Question

For genetic analysis fungi are considered good models because they are

• A. Similar to humans, their cells are predominantly diploid.
• B. It is easy to isolate and analyze mutant strains.
• C. Several disease-related genes in humans have homologs in fungi.
• D. Fungal genomes are much smaller than humans making them easier to work with.

Answer 1

The correct option is D Fungal genomes are much smaller than humans making them easier to work with.

• For genetic analysis, one has to study the genetic structure of the cell or the organism they are working on.
• The eukaryote genetic material is very complex and also very large in size for some eukaryotes like plants and animals. DNA has both introns and exons, from which introns are the ones that do not code for any specific protein that is known although some are found to code for functional RNAs or proteins, other than that introns in the DNA are mostly non-functional.
• The fungal genome has very less amount of introns or in some cases such as yeast introns only at the end of the sequence. This decreases the work of the researcher in differentiating introns from exons to study the proteins and metabolic pathways.
• Also with less or no introns the genome of the fungi is smaller in size compared to the animal and plant genome. So it is easier to work with them.

Therefore the answer option D is correct.