00:00There's a group of fungi called mucoralis, and they have this weird evolutionary trick that they can basically, like, not
00:07on a whim, but like kind of on a whim, decide whether they want to be a yeast or a
00:12fungus, a mycelium, like a mushroom.
00:16The way that this works, scientists just discovered, is that they have two what are called paralogs.
00:23They're genes that evolved convergently, so like, there's divergent evolution, where like stuff comes from one source, and then there's
00:32convergent evolution, where the same thing evolves completely separately in two different ways.
00:36These genes evolved in two totally different ways, and now they both exist in the same organism, and it allows
00:42the organism to kind of pick which expression it wants to do at any given time.
00:46The hope is that eventually these will have some kind of use in medical tech, but all that's still being
00:53explored, so we'll have to wait and see.
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