According to evolutionary theory, the advantage of sex is that recombination shuffles together new combinations of genes, thereby producing genetic variation and allowing deleterious mutations to be purged. But some extremely successful organisms are both asexual and ancient: the very existence of such 'scandalous' asexuals flies in the face of theory. Among them are counted the arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi, the Glomales, studies of the genome structure and organization of which now reveal some remarkable phenomena. The papers concerned appear in Fungal Genetics and Biology and Gene. Most notably, they identify a striking degree of divergence in the ribosomal sequences of individuals among the Glomales.
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