The Sexual Cycle in Neurospora

Abstract

Species of the genus Neurospora have been much studied as model systems for understanding metabolic pathways and their regulation, the processes and consequences of sexuality, and the natural history and evolution of a representative fungal genus. These subjects have been extensively reviewed in the literature, and there seems to be no urgent need to update them. The initiation and progression of events in fruiting bodies and asci has been the subject of a recent careful and scholarly review, to which the reader is enthusiastically referred (Raju, 1992). By contrast, the subject of nutrition of perithecia of developing asci, and of communication between nuclei as judged by dominance and by success or failure of complementation in the developing perithecial system has received little recent discussion. Much of the knowledge exists as unpublished bits of information, some of it from the laboratory of the author, or as minor observations made in connection with more substantial findings on other subjects. Such information is nonetheless useful in thinking about how development of fruiting bodies occurs. This review will be unabashedly eclectic, inferential, and anecdotal.