This Fungus Has More Than 17,000 Sexes

Amazing stuff! Once the gender identity ideology purveyors get onto this, they will either have a feast or they collapse! (just kidding) 😄

"Some common mushrooms likely have more than 17,000 sexes, researchers report March 31 in PLOS Genetics. The work could help us better understand the evolution of sexual reproduction as well as showcases the increasing power of genome sequencing. ...
Now ... lower costs of next generation technologies made sequencing so many individuals feasible.  ... team were able to use newer, long-read sequencing to generate high-quality genomes that acted as scaffolds for accurate assemblies of the short reads. The combination of methods made it so the researchers could precisely pinpoint which parts of the MATA and MATB genetic regions were important for sex determination as well as count the number of different relevant variations in those two areas. ..."

From the abstract:

"Balancing selection, an evolutionary force that retains genetic diversity, has been detected in multiple genes and organisms, such as the sexual mating loci in fungi. However, to quantify the strength of balancing selection and define the mating-related genes require a large number of strains. In tetrapolar basidiomycete fungi, sexual type is determined by two unlinked loci, MATA and MATB. Genes in both loci define mating type identity, control successful mating and completion of the life cycle. These loci are usually highly diverse. ... Here, we sequenced a hundred and eighty strains of three Trichaptum species. We characterized the chromosomal location of MATA and MATB, the molecular structure of MAT regions and their allelic richness. The sequencing effort was sufficient to molecularly characterize multiple MAT alleles segregating before the speciation event of Trichaptum species. Analyses suggested that long-term balancing selection has generated trans-species polymorphisms. Mating sequences were classified in different allelic classes based on an amino acid identity (AAI) threshold supported by phylogenetics. 17,550 mating types were predicted based on the allelic classes. In vitro crosses allowed us to support the degree of allelic divergence needed for successful mating. Even with the high amount of divergence, key amino acids in functional domains are conserved. ..."

This Fungus Has More Than 17,000 Sexes | The Scientist Magazine® Advances in sequencing technologies have finally allowed researchers to zero in on the genetic diversity underlying the incredible mating system of shelf fungi.

Large-scale fungal strain sequencing unravels the molecular diversity in mating loci maintained by long-term balancing selection (open access)