Menu

Blog

Jul 16, 2023

Long-Lived Fungi Have Evolved a Way to Cheat Death For Centuries

Posted by in category: futurism

Long-lived fungi are the latest organisms to go under the microscope in search of new understandings as to why they don’t accrue life-limiting mutations, given their age.

Researchers at Wageningen University in the Netherlands set out to compare “the peculiarities” of multicellular growth in filamentous fungi. What they ended up with was a new hypothesis explaining how certain types of fungi keep a lid on freeloading mutations that accumulate in their thread-like mycelia; the root-like structures of fungal colonies.

The filaments of mushroom-forming fungi spend much of their long lives with two, separate nuclei, each containing one-half of a full set of chromosomes. Only in the gills of mushrooms moments before forming spores do the two haploid nuclei mesh together in a brief union to reproduce asexually.

Comments are closed.