parasexualadj.

1954 G. Pontecorvo in Proc. 9th Internat. Congr. Genetics 192 In the last ten years, processes other than standard sexual reproduction, and yet resulting in recombination of hereditary properties, have come to light in microorganisms of widely different groups... The purpose of the present paper is to give a summary of the work which has led, in our Laboratory, to the discovery in the filamentous fungi of another of these mechanisms, which could be called ‘para-sexual’.

1962 G. Dalldorf Fungi & Fungous Dis. x. 135 Even in asexual fungi, recombinant types may arise through a parasexual process.

1977 P. B. Medawar & J. S. Medawar Life Sci. iii. 39 In some bacteria..the sexual process is restricted to something that amounts to hardly more than the infection of one bacterium by nucleic acid from another—the ‘parasexual’ process that lies at the root of the enormously important phenomenon of bacterial transformation.

1983 E. C. Minkoff Evolutionary Biol. i. 3/1 All organisms—or very nearly all—are also capable of either a sexual or a parasexual process in which hereditary information is transmitted to other organisms in the same populations.

1999 D. Ingram & N. Robertson Plant Dis. i. 30 This process, termed the parasexual cycle,..has now been shown to be a widespread source of pathogenic variation in the ‘Deuteromycetes’.

1967 Jrnl. Aesthetics & Art Crit. 26 207/2 I personally feel that parasexual responses are most likely to be stimulated by the theater, mime, and dance because of the direct physical presence of the performer.

1974 J. Marks Mick Jagger 114 We can't quite grasp the parasexual shadow he flaunts.

1980 Amer. Jrnl. Philol. 101 426 Catullus' Phalaecian poems often refer..to sexual or parasexual activity in plain every-day Latin or by means of transparent metaphor.

1999 J. Burchill Married Alive v. 75 I had been pitched into one of those parasexual relationships I had always feared and loathed..—a sophisticated variation of..the game of Kiss-Chase.

1958 Q. Rev. Biol. 33 94/1 Pontecorvo on parasexuality in fungi.

1974 Nature 18 Jan. 142/1 Using an improved version of the methods employing parasexuality.., we have selected axenic resegregants carrying various markers from non-axenic strains.

1986 M. Kogut tr. H. G. Schlegel Gen. Microbiol. v. 175 Parasexuality has been demonstrated in these [sc. Deuteromycetes], as well as in Basidiomycetes and some Ascomycetes.

1998 Representations Spring 15 ‘Men of the World’ invoke the ‘middle ground’ of open yet licit sexuality—what historian Peter Bailey has called parasexuality.