Question

7. Beadle started his career working on Drosophila, but changed his study system to bread mould (Neurospora crassa) for his studies in biosynthetic pathways. Why might it be easier and less time-consuming to use bread mould (a haploid organism) to study the effects of induced mutation on enzyme function?

Answer 1

Bread mold (Neurospora crassa) is a type of eukaryotic haploid fungal organism. The genome of N. crassa is more compact, and about 31% of its genomes match with the human genomes. As this is a haploid organism, it is easy to insert breaks and delete base pairs and perform gene recombination. We can observe the change in phenotypes after deletion of certain gene pairs and their importance in human genomes.

Also, haploids grow at a faster rate than diploids, they double within 90 minutes. Means, the changes in enzyme function can also be observed within less duration of time. So, the bread mold has become an important and comfortable model organism to study the biosynthetic pathways.