Sydney Glassman

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.

We have our genes from our mom and our dad, and they combine...

And then we have two copies 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 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 then the last thing that also is my favorite is they actually were able to co-opt these genes from bacteria.

So bacteria have really amazing abilities to...

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.