Fungi: mycelia, mushrooms & more

Human activities have left a detrimental impact on the Earth and its environment – from oil spills leaking into the ocean to tons of plastic products overwhelming our landfills. Even if we were to alter our habits completely, much of the damage we have caused cannot be fully reversed. Researchers have tested numerous techniques to reduce the amounts of contaminants and pollutants in our environment, but many of these methods are expensive and time-consuming, yielding slow results. Fortunately, there may be a solution hiding right below our feet: fungi.

Known for their skills in biodegradation, fungi are typically thought of as organisms that break down organic matter – possibly decaying trees, fecal matter, or dead plants and animals. However, different types of fungi can also decompose, filter out, or absorb not only synthetic matter but also toxic compounds and contaminants. Scientists have been using this unique quality in fungi in a process called mycoremediation. This method may help clear our soil and water pollution and tackle our immense plastic problem.

EU researchers are cultivating fungi on agricultural waste to create smarter and greener construction materials able to adapt and react to their environment, and even repair themselves.

cross-posted from: https://beehaw.org/post/21639084

Even in midsummer, the ancient hazelwoods on the Hebridean island of Seil are cool and quiet. Countless slanted stems of hazel support a thick canopy, which blots out the sun and blankets everything below in a sort of “fairytale darkness”, says Bethan Manley, a biologist at the Wellcome Sanger Institute.

Moss and lichen coat branches threaded with honeysuckle, forming a great dome above you, adds David Satori, a researcher at Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew.

This rich forest, on Scotland’s Hebridean islands, is a remnant of one of Britain’s oldest woodland environments. When the last ice age ended, the mile-thick glacier that had buried northern Europe melted away and hazelnuts sprouted across the rock left behind.

Scientists can date when those forests sprang up across the west coast of Britain and Ireland, says Satori, because “about 10,000 years ago, you have a massive spike in hazel pollen”. Scottish lichenologists have estimated these particular woodlands might have been around since 7,500BC.

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The new material is fully biodegradable, tear-resistant, and functionally versatile, achieved without any chemical processing.

The paper can be found here

Found this one in the woods behind my house. One of my favorite mushrooms to find even though there's not much to do with it, it's beautiful just to look at!

The blue "milk" contains latex, so don't handle if you're allergic. It's related to regular milk caps and looks identical aside from the brilliant color.

Something that you don't often see in field guides: it smells quite sweet in addition to the usual earthiness.

I will be returning it to the forest floor to drop its spores in hopes I keep finding them.

Mycorrhizal fungi help plants thrive, and sequester a lot of carbon. But a new atlas shows these climate warriors need urgent protection.

Check out the Society for the Protection of Underground Networks (SPUN)

Some mushrooms are sturdier than others, but it isn’t necessarily because of their chemistry – it’s how the filaments that make them up are arranged.

cross-posted from: https://beehaw.org/post/21004376

I went back [to western Oregon] last fall, wanting to understand the same thing Christian did: what a changing climate means for mushrooms. What might we learn from the exuberant cindercap and all of their kin? How does one lie dormant for an eternity and then thrive amid what appears, to some, as disaster? Because it seemed to me that disaster was unfolding all around. Climate catastrophes were increasing exponentially, and American rancor was at an epic level, and an election was right around the bend. How could I use fungi, and all that we know—and don’t know—about them, as a lens through which I might find greater understanding? What lessons might they offer us about when to hide and when to burst forth? About how to recognize the tethers we have with the world around us and to nurture them so we might all grow stronger?

What might fungi have to say about waiting for devastation—transformation—to come and then knowing that the only response is to launch your body skyward, make more of yourselves, gather every friend and family member you can find and rise together? To be exuberant, even as the winds rekindle the fires burning in every direction, sparks flying.

When it comes to perceiving the extent of the fungal kingdom, our senses are wholly inadequate. Most fungi that humans tend to notice are the ephemeral sexual fruiting bodies we hunger for—for food, for medicine, for beauty, for blowing our minds. Homo sapiens’ sense of smell atrophied long ago; if we even want to find underground truffles, we need dogs and pigs. In the limited and delineated ways of human thinking—“animal, plant, or mineral?”—fungi defy categorization as we usually conceive of it. Long lumped in with plants, fungi were only recognized as their own kingdom in 1969.

They are neither plant nor animal, but a wild conglomeration of things, existing in ways that are so central to ecosystems that what we have learned about them forces the breakdown of traditional taxonomy. Large-scale DNA-sequencing datasets are expanding daily, but identifying a double helix doesn’t tell you how an organism exists in relationship with everything around it. And even with what we have learned, scientists from the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew estimate that as many as 95 percent of the planet’s fungal species have not yet been identified.

For the species we do know about, the vast majority are mycorrhizal, living in close relationship with a photosynthetic partner, exchanging resources so both can survive and thrive. Plants give their carbon-laced sugars to the fungi, and the fungi exponentially increase the plant’s uptake of nutrients and water in exchange. This partnership allows plants to better tolerate stresses, from droughts to pests to pathogens, and helps trees like Douglas firs and redwoods reach their towering heights. Author Merlin Sheldrake describes mycelium, which makes up the mycorrhizal network, as the “ecological connective tissue, the living seam by which much of the world is stitched into relation.”

No one offered me psychedelics while at the Yachats Mushroom Festival, but I was handed an eggnog spiked with whiskey infused with a sweet-tasting fungi known as candy cap mushroom—it was delicious. I also went on official and unofficial mushroom walks—“This place is fungally devoid!” exclaimed Joe at the dearth of mushrooms—and heard Christian Schwarz deliver the keynote talk as a crowd of hundreds nibbled on chanterelle pasta and puff pastries filled with spinach, artichoke, and chanterelles, also delicious.

When I asked people about the phrase “disaster mycology,” most hadn’t heard of it. Or they wanted to focus on the positive aspects of the fungi world. It was a festival, after all. It seems more popular to turn fungi into a kind of panacea. News articles keep popping up about researchers finding new ways to turn fungi into saviors to fix our broken world and bodies. Fungi to consume plastics. Fungi to replace plastics. Fungi to clean up oil spills. Psilocybins to fix undesirable thought patterns. Fungi inoculations to transform agricultural production. It is fungi that gave us penicillin and the drugs to allow organ transplant recipients to live. If we humans ingest them, they can nourish us, make us puke, or take us to the stars. Sometimes all at once. Can they fix everything?

Maybe that’s the wrong question.

As I read more, I was beginning to feel that the right question might be to ask them for a lesson on how to exist in the world in the first place. With water and air warming, considering the world from the vantage of fungi could be illuminating. They’ve had the ability to sustain and persevere for hundreds of millions of years, after all. I decided I needed to reach out to one of the authors of the disaster mycology paper, Johns Hopkins epidemiologist Arturo Casadevall. He, along with a colleague, had coined the term that was haunting me.

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Researchers at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln are investigating a novel fungus, Exophiala viscosa.

Currently, melanin is primarily sourced from squid ink, which is costly and requires the death of squids.

The research aims to enhance melanin secretion for various applications, including sunscreens, textiles and space travel, where melanin's protective properties against gamma radiation could be invaluable. Additionally, melanin might aid in bioremediation efforts for "forever chemicals" and toxic metals.

A recent academic review argues that up to 83% of ectomycorrhizal (ECM) fungi species, which form partnerships with trees, may be unknown to science.

This ignorance has important implications.

A team of researchers has turned ordinary yeast into tiny, glowing drug factories, creating and testing billions of peptide-based compounds in record time. This green-tech breakthrough could fast-track safer, more precise medicines and reshape the future of pharma.

Invidious lilnk

Since 2020, Loop Biotech has been making biodegradable caskets out of mycelium, the root-like structure of mushrooms, and hemp. Unlike traditional wooden caskets, which are often treated with chemicals that leech into the soil, the company’s offerings are made of natural materials that enrich the soil as they biodegrade—a process that only takes 45 days after burial.

So far, Loop Biotech has sold about 2,500 caskets in Europe—primarily in the Netherlands, but also in Germany and other parts of central Europe. But Ancker-Robert’s father, Mark Ancker, has just become the first person in the U.S. to be buried in Loop Biotech’s mycelium casket, called the Living Cocoon. “It was dignified, and beautiful,” says Ancker-Robert, who buried her father in a forest clearing on his property. “I have confidence that my dad will be fully part of the garden by winter.”

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Archive link: https://archive.is/dla4n

It is estimated that only 155,000 of the roughly 2–3 million fungal species on the planet have been formally described. Now, a review published in Current Biology shows that as much as 83% of ectomycorrhizal species are so-called dark taxa.

Making a discovery with the potential for innovative applications in pharmaceutical development, a West Virginia University microbiology student has found a long sought-after fungus that produces effects similar to the semisynthetic drug LSD, which is used to treat conditions like depression, post-traumatic stress disorder and addiction.

Fungal paper batteries could reduce e-waste, but they’re still a long way from reality

13:33 architect (moderator)

25:25 builder

31:46 designer, mycologist

41:01 industrial designer

52:40 architect

1:09:45 QA

Mycelium Thinking CIC is an arts-led 'radical connection' network. We explore and promote the deeper community ties needed to co-create more flourishing futures for both people and planet.

Stockholm-based Studio TOOJ has designed surreal Duk collection made of wood and mycelium that give illusion of cloth draped furniture.