Fungi's magic for climate change

Today's snowdrops

It has been a long while since the last post, since my mind has been on subjects far removed from mushrooms. My obsession with all things fungi must have decided to take time off for Christmas - but it's back now, all refreshed and ready to keep me going for yet another year.

And not a moment too soon, as it looks like spring has arrived to Scotland two months early. First spring flowers have come out, buds on the trees are opening, and little birds in my garden just wouldn't shut up. As for the drakes on the mill pond... Ahem. All right, I'll stop right there, but you get the idea.

While I was pondering over the current weather anomaly, a message dropped into my inbox with a link to an article about fungi competing with microbes for nitrogen in soil, therefore preventing the latter from breaking up plant matter. This results in more carbon being retained in the soil, as opposed to being released into the atmosphere to add to the greenhouse effect. The article notes that not all fungi are created equal in this respect. It is just the ecto- and ericoid mycorrhizal fungi that do this, with their soil samples containing 70% more carbon than those of arbuscular mycorrhizal ones.

The most famous example of an ectomycorrhizal fungus is the cep (Boletus edulis). So here is an additional incentive to learn to cultivate it: if only we learned how, in addition to an amazing food source, we wouldn't need to worry about climate change anymore...

Botanicula

The journey begins

I came over this unusual game by accident, and still wondering if I should get a full version of it. It is a point and click adventure in which a motley crew of mushrooms and insects are embarking on a journey to plant a seed. It has most adorable sounds and music (if you listen to the tiny squeaks those travelling fungi make, you are guaranteed to fall in love with them after five minutes), and graphics like I have never seen before. Beautiful. And weird (in a good sense).

As for the gameplay, the demo can be played in under a minute if you know what you are doing, but the great thing about this game is that there are so many objects and places you can explore that are not compulsory. The more you click, the more cute animations and adorable sounds you discover.

A full version of Botanicula costs $10, and if you enjoy leisurely meditative puzzles (although, who doesn't?), it is worth every penny.

Mushroom gardening

Shaggy scalycap, growing under
a cherry tree - a beautiful sight

Mushroom season is clearly at an end. Mycelium in Scottish forests has exhausted all its stored nutrients, and thus very few new fruitbodies are produced. There might still be some stray bay boletes and pearl puffballs popping out, so I might make one or two more foraging trips this year, but this looks like a good moment to put this blog into a winter mode, with three posts a week instead of five.

It has been a reasonably good season. Not as amazingly spectacular as promised by national news back in August, but I still managed to stock my freezer with a few kilograms of fine porcini, not to mention all the fresh wild mushroom dishes that I'd cooked for my long-suffering family over the summer and early autumn. They are openly relieved that wild fungi will be off menu for a while!

There is no longer any pressure to bring home "the goods", so it was easier to pay more attention to purely aesthetic qualities of fungi I encountered. It is curious that while the edibles are all but spent, all other kinds just keep jumping out of the ground, adding colour and texture to parks, lawns and gardens. Consider the scalycap fungus pictured above: I found it at the edge of a communal garden, and it certainly looks like someone planted the flowers around it to create a perfect composition, in anticipation of its emergence as the centrepiece of the floral composition.

A group of Paxillus validus

Or take the next picture, a group of Paxillus validus, lovely brown and golden fungi (closely related to brown roll rims) that I spotted growing next to the Riverside museum in Glasgow this weekend. The area where they are sprouting has only recently been developed, and as such it only features fairly small tree saplings on standard-issue grass cover. How fortunate that the roots of those saplings were carrying fungal mycelium! It will take many years for the place to become a real park, but in the meantime the mushrooms successfully manage to break the monotony of generic planted landscape, and make the place look so much closer to nature.

Decorative mushroom gardening? Not as preposterous as it sounds!

Fungi and bacteria speed up tree growth

Now we know why trees
grow so tall

Today's news article contains a report that a special mix of bacteria and mycorrhizal fungi speed up tree growth and therefore can be a significant tool in reforestation.

The figure of 40% is most impressive: in the study, fruiting trees reached maturity in 3-4 years instead of 6-7, and non-fruiting varieties displayed similarly vigorous growth.

Strictly speaking, it's not news that fungi and soil bacteria are beneficial for plant growth, but such significant increase in growth means that the researchers managed to stumble on a lucky combination of the two.

Great work. If only the article authors would spell "mycorrhizal" right!

Image credit:
Oak forest

Richard Dawkins on the effects of hallucinogenic mushrooms

The video below is of Richard Dawkins responding to Graham Hancock's question about whether he'd consider taking hallucinogenic drugs. If you cannot bear the low video quality, here's the transcript of his key point:

"I think it very unlikely that whatever happened to me would be interpreted as indicating anything supernatural. I would, on the contrary, interpret it as a manifestation of what a wonderful thing a brain is, and how the brain can see and experience even more things under the right kinds of chemical stimulation."

I fully agree with the first part of his statement: there is nothing supernatural in the effects of drugs, it is just brain chemistry trying to fix itself following the injection of foreign substances. Drugs, however, do not make you see "more things" - it is just the same things, only skewed and unrecognisable. For this reason, I'd stay away from any mind-altering chemicals. It is difficult enough to make sense of the world with an uninebriated brain.

Fungi in space

That's what Martian colonisation
should look like

I recently came across a web site recruiting a crew to go to Mars. The project's name is Mars One, and their plan is to set up the first permanent extraterrestrial human settlement, and also make a reality show which would finance its operations. To date, about 78 thousand people have submitted their applications, although this figure is rather misleading since only about 700 out of these actually sent in complete applications, including the fee.

The scheme has already been multiply criticised for not being feasible, mostly for financial reasons. I also disapprove, and predictably so, because there seems to be no place for fungi in their plans for life support modules.

Generally, given the diversity of possible fungi uses, it is surprising how little presence they have in schemes for space colonisation. Mars One project aside, several governments are currently making plans for constructing a permanent lunar base in the next decade, and those look fairly realistic to me. However, no one seems to be paying any attention to the potential use of fungi: all references I've managed to find online were dealing with unwanted fungal infestations and how to contain them in enclosed space habitats.

I really don't understand why. Fungi are an excellent source of food, both directly as edible mycelium or fruit bodies, and indirectly through increasing the yield of food plants. In addition, they can offer production of cheap biofuel from plant waste and also provide packaging and structural materials as a renewable alternative to plastics.

Right, now if you'll excuse me, I have these calls to make to NASA and RosKosmos. They must be shown the errors of their ways immediately.

Image: This is my photo of an artist's vision of a Mars colony; the author of the painting is Diana Nurtdinova from Pervouralsk, Russia.

Good news from Vienna - biofuel breakthrough

Trichoderma harzianum under
the microscope

When people think about fungi, they tend to regard them, first and foremost, as food. This is justified to some extent since historically fungi had little more to offer, except perhaps their beauty (or, indeed, ugliness) that was captured in art from medieval times to our days. This is a fascinating topic in itself, and I will surely return to it in another post, but today I wanted to write about the uses of fungi that have become available with modern technology.

In a previous post I looked at an article that presented fungi as an alternative to plastics, in the form of either biodegradable packaging or insulation material. It seems like there is currently a trend for engineers and scientists to explore the possibilities for non-food uses of fungi, as this week there was another news item, this time from the University of Vienna, reporting their success for synthesising biofuel from cellulose with the aid of a fungus of the Trichoderma genus.

Rather expensive biofuel

Biofuel can be easily produced from starchy plants, but this puts its production in competition with growing these plants for food. Cellulose, on the other hand, is present in common waste products like straw and sawdust and seems like a much better alternative. Unfortunately, breaking it down into small sugar molecules that can be subsequently turned into spirits requires special biologically active substances called enzymes. Microscopic Trichoderma fungi can produce these enzymes, but only when yet another special substance, inductor, is present. And here we have a problem: this inductor is 60 times more expensive than gold, which makes the resulting spirit cost about the same as 10-year-old Laphroaig. You wouldn't fuel your car with that if you have any financial sense.

Luckily, the researchers came across a strain of the fungus with a mutation that kept the switch for the enzyme in permanent "on" position, removing the need for the inductor. Such fungus could not have survived in the wild as it would be equivalent to a bird that keeps laying eggs non-stop. Yay, a domesticated fungus! Not a chanterelle sadly, but it's a good start. Subsequent genetic analysis isolated the responsible gene, which allowed to understand the mechanism for the molecular switch, and - voila!  - it seems like we are one step closer to averting the impending oil crisis, and that is very good news indeed.

Full text of the article can be found on the Science Daily web site.

Image credits:
Trichoderma mycelium
Laphroaig distillery

Alternative to plastics?

This is what a fungus really looks like

Like most people, I start my day by browsing news sites. After looking through headlines for top stories and confirming that our planet is still more or less in one piece, I go on to see if there's anything new happening in the world of fungi. I usually find stuff in the category of nature news, sometimes in the category of crime news, and occasionally under weird news. My favourite items though are on innovation and technology. I love learning about the possible ways in which fungi can change the world, and one such piece was published just yesterday.

Many people think of fungi in terms of their fruitbodies, forgetting that the most important and persistent part of the organism is the mycelium, or hyphae, that live in the substrate under our feet. Mycelium itself can be edible, so it is rather unjustly ignored. However, the article in question brings out a different use for it, namely, as an insulation and packaging material. Apparently, it's cheap to produce, it's less toxic, more vapour-permeable, fire-resistant (as shown on CSI New York) and very, very eco-friendly. It is manufactured by a company called Ecovative Design and they claim that it provides a viable alternative to structural insulated panels made with plastic foams.

Town of the future: a typical street

It looks like there are still issues that need to be resolved before people start routinely insulating their houses with fungi (most notably, how do you prevent them from getting wet and turning into rot?), but it's certainly a development that has potential. Who knows, maybe in 10-20 years all new builds will be Ecovative's "Mushroom houses". I personally can't wait for that to happen.

The full article can be found on the Earth Techling site.

Image credits:
Hyphae as seen under an overturned log
Smurfs decoration