Bread mould is almost as complex as humans

Next time you pick up a loaf covered in bread mould think twice before throwing it into the dustbin. After all, this is an organism that can sense the time of day and react to different colours, new research reported yesterday has revealed.

Researchers at the Whitehead Institute Centre for Genome Research in Cambridge, Massachusetts, have worked out the genetic blueprint of Neurospora crassa – better known as bread mould. The mould's genes indicated it had a biological clock and could sense the time of day, react to blue and red light and was able to defend itself against invading viruses, a report in the journal Nature said.

Commenting on the work in Nature, Jonathan Arnold and Nelson Hilton from the University of Georgia in Athens, US, said that "the number of genes is not so different from humans" adding that "we are truly not that far genetic complexity from the common bread mould".

Bread mould, first identified in 1843 as a contaminant of bakeries in Paris, helped pave the way for modern genetics and molecular biology.