It's like something out of a William Burroughs novel......gives new meaning to left coast home of the gay counter culture..... gay fungi spores that are pathogens to humans....yep right out of a Burroughs Novel...life is a virus he would say now we know that it is also a spore.......Moves to London in 1960. Back in Tangiers in August of 1961, with Ginsberg and others, meets Timothy Leary who gives them all mushrooms. Burroughs doesn't enjoy the experience, saying: "Urgent warning. I think I'll stay here in shriveling envelopes of larval flesh... One of the nastiest cases ever produced by this department."

Homosexual fungi spawn deadly strain
Researchers in the U.S. report that a deadly fungus which spread from Vancouver Island to the mainland was spawned when two less-dangerous strains engaged in homosexual union. A paper published yesterday in the journal Nature argues that the severe new strain -- cryptococcus gattii -- is the result of sexual reproduction between two types of a similar species of fungi, despite the fact that both were of the same sex.

Same-sex mating by fungi spawned infection outbreak, evidence suggests

DURHAM, N.C. – Same-sex mating between two less harmful yeast strains might have spawned an outbreak of disease among otherwise healthy people and animals on Vancouver Island, British Columbia, Howard Hughes Medical Institute geneticists at Duke University Medical Center have reported. The fungus, Cryptococcus gattii, is normally restricted to the tropics and subtropics.

The researchers said their findings provide important additional insight into the origin of the Vancouver Island outbreak, which began in 1999. Moreover, the evidence that sex played an important role in the pathogen's expansion may provide a useful model for the evolution of infectious diseases and parasites more generally, they said.

Earlier studies by the Duke team found that most Vancouver Island outbreak isolates are sexually fertile, but all are of one "sex," a trend that would seem to preclude the normal sexual cycle. A recent laboratory study led by Heitman's group suggested a possible explanation: the related yeast C. neoformans can undergo same-sex mating between two alpha partners.

Among clinical and environmental isolates of the fungus from British Columbia, the researchers identified two forms: an extremely virulent major strain, which accounted for 95 percent of all samples, and a less virulent and less common strain, which made up the other five percent.

By comparing select gene sequences that spanned the genomes of the Vancouver Island fungi to samples collected from around the world, the team traced the rarer type to identical isolates in Australia. The major form matched a sample taken from an infected person in Seattle 30 years ago and another collected from a Eucalyptus tree in San Francisco in 1992