Microsporidia are a diverse group of highly derived fungal relatives that are intracellular parasites of many animals. Both transcription and introns have been shown to be unusual in microsporidia: The complete genome of the human parasite Encephalitozoon cuniculi has only a few very short introns, and two distantly related microsporidian spores have been shown to harbor transcripts encoding several genes that overlap on different strands. However, microsporidia alternate between two life stages: the intracellular proliferative stage and the extracellular and largely metabolically dormant infectious spore.
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