South Texas Center for Emerging Infectious Diseases (STCEID), Department of Biology, University of Texas at San Antonio, San Antonio, TX 78249.
School of BioSciences, University of Melbourne, Parkville 3010 VIC, Australia.
Microbiol Spectr. 2017 Mar;5(2). doi: 10.1128/microbiolspec.FUNK-0041-2017.
Although at the level of resolution of genes and molecules most information about mating in fungi is from a single lineage, the Dikarya, many fundamental discoveries about mating in fungi have been made in the earlier branches of the fungi. These are nonmonophyletic groups that were once classified into the chytrids and zygomycetes. Few species in these lineages offer the potential of genetic tractability, thereby hampering the ability to identify the genes that underlie those fundamental insights. Research performed during the past decade has now established the genes required for mating type determination and pheromone synthesis in some species in the phylum Mucoromycota, especially in the order Mucorales. These findings provide striking parallels with the evolution of mating systems in the Dikarya fungi. Other discoveries in the Mucorales provide the first examples of sex-cell type identity being driven directly by a gene that confers mating type, a trait considered more of relevance to animal sex determination but difficult to investigate in animals. Despite these discoveries, there remains much to be gleaned about mating systems from these fungi.
虽然在基因和分子水平上，有关真菌交配的大多数信息都来自于一个单一的谱系，即双真菌界，但许多关于真菌交配的基本发现都是在真菌的早期分支中做出的。这些分支是非单系的，曾经被分类为壶菌和接合菌。这些谱系中的少数物种具有遗传可操作性的潜力，从而阻碍了识别那些基本见解背后的基因的能力。在过去十年中进行的研究现在已经确定了在一些粘菌类门物种中，特别是在毛霉目中，用于交配型决定和信息素合成的基因。这些发现与双真菌界真菌交配系统的进化提供了惊人的相似之处。毛霉目中的其他发现提供了第一个直接由赋予交配型的基因驱动性细胞类型身份的例子，这一特征被认为与动物性别决定更相关，但在动物中很难进行研究。尽管有这些发现，但从这些真菌中了解交配系统还有很多需要了解。
