IT’S biological heresy. But each spore of a simple soil fungus turns out to contain more than one genome. In fact, each one may even have thousands of genetic identities.
The fungus, Glomus etunicatum, helps plant roots “scavenge” phosphorus from soil and has co-existed with plants around the world for millions of years. Like other related fungi, G. etunicatum reproduces asexually, and while each spore contains up to thousands of individual nuclei, each one was thought to be genetically identical.
Now Ian Sanders and Mohamed Hijri of the University of Lausanne in Switzerland have found this isn’t so. They have…
