Fungi: mycelia, mushrooms & more

New information about historical uses of fungi continues to be discovered from museums as accessions of fungi and objects made from fungi collected over the last 150+ years are examined and identified. Two textiles thought to be made from fungal mats are located in the Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, and the Oakland Museum of California.

Although DNA sequencing failed to yield a taxonomic identification, microscopy and characteristics of the mycelial mats suggest that the mats were produced by Laricifomes officinalis.

MycoHab has developed mycoblocks – large, solid brown slabs grown from oyster mushroom waste.

Stronger than conventional concrete, these mushroom-based bricks are the result of an initiative by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in collaboration with the Standard Bank, led by MycoHab.

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The plastic-digesting capabilities of the fungus Parengyodontium album could be harnessed to degrade polyethylene, the most abundant type of plastic in the ocean

A fungus found on litter floating in the North Pacific Ocean can break down the most abundant type of plastic that ends up in the sea.

Vaksmaa believes that the fungus, known as Parengyodontium album, has great potential, but she is cautious about putting it to use in the wild. “If we take a microbe and add it to a natural system, then we may ruin it while trying to do good,” she says. Instead, she suggests it may be best to gather the plastic first and bring it back to land to be digested by P. album that has been grown in bulk. This could be achieved using well-established techniques, similar to those used in the brewing industry, she says.

Creating fertilizers from organic waste can help reduce the consumption of fossil fuels and promote sustainable production. One way of doing this is through hydrothermal liquefaction (HTL), which converts biomass into biocrude oil through a high-temperature, high-pressure process.

Two studies from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign explore the use of a fungal treatment to convert the leftover wastewater into fertilizer for agricultural crops.

The first study, "Hydrothermal liquefaction aqueous phase mycoremediation to increase inorganic nitrogen availability,"

The second study, "Wastewater Nutrient Recovery via Fungal and Nitrifying Bacteria Treatment,"

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Next time you purchase white button mushrooms at the grocery store, just remember, they may be cute and bite-size but they have a relative out west that occupies some 2,384 acres (965 hectares) of soil in Oregon's Blue Mountains. Put another way, this humongous fungus would encompass 1,665 football fields, or nearly four square miles (10 square kilometers) of turf.

The discovery of this giant Armillaria ostoyae in 1998 heralded a new record holder for the title of the world's largest known organism, believed by most to be the 110-foot- (33.5-meter-) long, 200-ton blue whale. Based on its current growth rate, the fungus is estimated to be 2,400 years old but could be as ancient as 8,650 years, which would earn it a place among the oldest living organisms as well.

A team of forestry scientists discovered the giant after setting out to map the population of this pathogenic fungus in eastern Oregon. The team paired fungal samples in petri dishes to see if they fused (see photo below), a sign that they were from the same genetic individual, and used DNA fingerprinting to determine where one individual fungus ended.

"These are very strange organisms to our anthropocentric way of thinking," says biochemist Myron Smith of Carleton University in Ottawa, Ontario. An Armillaria individual consists of a network of hyphae, he explains. "Collectively, this network is called the mycelium and is of an indefinite shape and size."