A DEADLY fungus thought to be asexual turns out to have a sex life after all, making it far more capable of evolving drug resistance than expected.
Paul Dyer of the University of Nottingham, UK, and his team discovered sex genes in the genome of Aspergillus fumigatus. They found both sexes in almost equal proportions in the wild, which is 鈥渨hat you would expect for a sexual organism鈥�, says Dyer. But the fungus only mates in favourable conditions, such as at a toasty 30 掳C (Nature, ).
The spores cause aspergillosis, a respiratory disease that kills over half of infected people. Dyer says sex, which helps genes evolve quicker, may explain the fungus鈥檚 increasing drug resistance.
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