A new study finds that the more than 90,000 species of mushrooms, molds, yeasts and other fungi found everywhere in the soil, water and air may owe their abilities to grow, spread, and even cause disease to an opportunistic virus they caught more than a billion years ago.
In the May 10 issue of eLife, researchers from Duke University and Stanford University suggest that a viral protein may have invaded the genomes of early fungi and hijacked their cell division control machinery, duping fungi into making more viruses as the fungal cells grew and divided. The viral protein was eventually adopted by its host and incorporated into the fungal genome, generating a family of proteins that are now critical to producing spores, invading host tissues and other fungal characteristics.
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