A fungus with over 20k sexes

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/d-brief/2017/11/06/fungus-genders/

by fanf2 • 9 years ago

87 27 9 years ago

blogs.discovermagazine.com

mar77i• 9 years ago

It strikes me as oddly cool for a fungus to find a cryptographic solution for their mating. And they still preserve some definition of a "collision".

drvdevd• 9 years ago

You mean roughly: fused_hyphae = (A+B) ^ (C+D)?

theonewhocanfly• 9 years ago

The site has malware, to be precise it pops up an ad which says your Android is infected

cpach• 9 years ago

Alternative link: https://www.popsci.com/fungi-sex

_0ffh3• 9 years ago

Well the Discovermagazine article at least gets right that this is about genetic diversity. The writer for Popsci butchers that into sexual diversity.

marchenko• 9 years ago

Fungus Tumblr must support a lot of tags.

justinjlynn• 9 years ago

The best of all possible worlds is a free-form text entry.

_jal• 9 years ago

Imagine how complicated the "about me" pages for OK Fungus are.

fs111• 9 years ago

The writing style is horrible.

xelxebar• 9 years ago

This is about the model species Schizophyllum commune. I found the OP article left me wanting to know more. The wikipedia page for S. commune links to a fascinating, in-depth page by an enthusiast:

http://botit.botany.wisc.edu/toms_fungi/feb2000.html

Also, there's this database with more pretty pictures and some distilled information:

http://www.mykoweb.com/CAF/species/Schizophyllum_commune.htm...

I hadn't realize how unique some of the fungal genetic systems were!

_0ffh3• 9 years ago

Q: There are lots of techniques to preserve genetic diversity in EA/GA, like e.g. niching. Does anyone know if this specific thing has ever been tried?

vanderZwan• 9 years ago

Could you elaborate what EA and GA stand for the uninformed but curious, like me?

Someone• 9 years ago

Evolutionary algorithms/genetic algorithms (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_algorithm)

OzzyB• 9 years ago

OT: The Joe Rogan podcast recently had Paul Stamets on who talks at great length about fungi and it's benefits -- truly fascinating stuff.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mPqWstVnRjQ

hourislate• 9 years ago

That segment about how the fungi slime reorganized the Tokyo Subway System into a more efficient system was fascinating. Curious whether you could use this in someway to design everything from Circuit Boards to Software. One of my favorites so far.

Symmetry• 9 years ago

My understanding is that the main reason for different sexes in Fungi is to figure out whose mitochondria go on to populate the child after the nuclear DNA is combined. Having mixed populations of mitochondria inside a cell would provide an incentive for competition among them, which would be a Bad Thing. Otherwise they fungi could just do away with sexes entirely for a further, much smaller, increase in the number of potential partners.

See Power, Sex, Suicide: Mitochondria and the Meaning of Life by Nick Lane.

appleflaxen• 9 years ago

Serious question; I hope it makes sense: What makes these "sexes" and not just "individuals"?

To elaborate a bit: when I read the description, it sounds like a person could make the same claim about humanity: "there are billions of sexes: John, Jane, Tim, Judy, Juan, Maria, etc etc"

How is this different? Or equivalently, what makes a "sex" a "sex" if it's just variability within the sex chromosome, but every individual is able to create progeny with 25% (?) of other individuals.

To me, that sounds like 4 sexes.

nanomoose• 9 years ago

There are 20k different sorts of genitals. More seriously, it would be chromosomal differences I guess.

mac010212• 9 years ago

what makes a "sex" a "sex" if it's just variability within the sex chromosome, but every individual is able to create progeny with 25% of other individuals?

I haven't read the article yet (looks like it's been DOSed by traffic from Hacker News?), but your criterion would be met in a population of 201 entities (numbered from 0 to 200) where each entity X can procreate with entities in the range [X-25 ... x+25] (mod 201, of course). That would arguably yield 201 distinct sexes, where each individual is sexually compatible with 25% of the population.

olympus2• 9 years ago

If a mapping between compatible sexes existed such as in your example, it would be more useful to think of sex as continuous spectrum rather than a discrete collection.

cdumler• 9 years ago

A DNA sex is a set that can merge successfully with another set that produces an offspring. This is not always possible in all life because some sections of the DNA are incompatible when swapped.

Here is the sparrow with four sexes: https://www.nature.com/news/the-sparrow-with-four-sexes-1.21...

Conversely, what we think of sex (the genitalia and dimorphism identification) may not even be defined specifically by genes sets, but by epigenetic/environmental responses.

Even though alligators have DNA sets that are swapped, they are largely physically sexed by temperature: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temperature-dependent_sex_dete...

It even has an advantage, as females without mates can sometimes spontaneously reproduce and have offspring that are both male and female: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parthenogenesis_in_squamata

alkyon• 9 years ago

Being gay would be especially challenging for that species.

rainbowmverse• 9 years ago

I'm sure there's plenty of bicelium.

reading-at-work• 9 years ago

I laughed for an unreasonably long time at "it must make for a wild singles night"

A fungus with over 20k sexes

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