Sydney Glassman

They can have, like, tons of different mating types where you might be able to have, like, 38 different... Instead of just, like, one male and a female, it could be, like, 38 different types of mating types.

So they have, like, a lot of different ways to sexually reproduce that humans or animals do not have, and that enables them to...

survive a lot of disturbances they can they can produce a bunch of different types of spores sexual and asexual a bunch of different fruiting bodies that can survive various disturbances so one way is through this sexual reproduction they are able okay so one thing that's really cool about basidiomycete fungi is that they literally instead of we are all diploid where we have our genes from our mom and our dad and they combine and then we have two copies in our in our cells

What they do is they separate them.

And so they're literally separated by either a clamp connection or a septation where the two nuclei are separate.

And they can have separate genes in them.

And they can express different genes in these different nuclei.

They only join really briefly, like

basically at the moment of um meiosis i don't know why we're looking in the cosmos for aliens we have aliens right here on earth is what i'm hearing yeah fungi are really cool i mean they really are really interesting and and then the last thing that i also is my favorite is they actually were able to co-op these genes from bacteria so bacteria have really amazing abilities to um

like all sorts of metabolic abilities.

And they are able to do horizontal gene transfer where they transfer genes from one organism to another.

So like for us, we have vertical transmission.

Like a mom gives birth to a baby.

That's the only way you can transmit genes.

But for bacteria, it's like, imagine you could share genes with your friends or you could share genes with other people in the room around you.

And usually they just do it between bacteria.

But fungi in this case, fungi took the genes from the bacteria.

So this is like a very strange, rare cross kingdom horizontal gene transfer occurrence where the fungi took the genes from the bacteria that enabled them to degrade charcoal.

Potentially.

Like actually one thing I really love about fungi is there's a lot not known about them.