Bread Mold (Neurospora crassa) wildtype

Neurospora is a genus of bread molds. The vegetative mycelium shown here is haploid: fruiting bodies from mycelia with opposite mating types fuse and produce a diploid cell, which undergoes two typical meiotic divisions followed by a single mitosis, to produce an ascus with eight ascospores. The four spores at either end of the sac are products of the same Meiosis I and are therefore genetically identical: this makes Neurospora a useful organism for genetic experimentation.