7 December 2013 | NewScientist | 39

Far from being a load of old rot, fungi could save the world, says Richard Webb

Magic mushrooms

WHAT do you call a man with a mushroom on his head? A fun guy. Paul Stamets, though, is deadly

serious. He is on a mission to save the world, and his choice of headgear tells you how he plans to do it. “We need to invest in fungi,” he says.

Mention the word fungus to most people, and the likely response is a shudder. Fungus is the mould on bread, the mildew on the ceiling, the infection in an unfortunate place. But that’s a tad unfair. Fungus is also the yeast that made the bread and our frothing pint of beer, not to mention the blue graining in our gourmet cheese. As with many long-term relationships, humankind and mould are bonded in love and hate.

If Stamets and his ilk get their way, this relationship is about to experience a fresh bloom of love. A slew of fungal technologies is creeping out of the woodwork, and they promise everything from better drugs, environmentally friendly materials and green fuels to… well, tomorrow’s fashion tips. Is this the dawning of the age of the fungus?

In point of fact, fungi have always been our allies, says Lynne Boddy, a mycologist and passionate advocate of mushrooms at Cardiff University in the UK. “Without fungi, planet Earth wouldn’t work,” she says. “You would be up to your armpits in dead stuff.”

Most of their action happens out of sight. A fungus might have a toadstool poking up from the forest floor or a tree stump, but its business end lies in a mass of filaments called the mycelium that can spread vast distances beneath. “A mushroom is just the tip of the iceberg,” says Boddy. “Except there’s only nine-tenths of an iceberg below the surface.”

Consider Armillaria solidipes, also known as the honey mushroom. In the Malheur National Forest in eastern Oregon, outcrops of its attractive yellow fruiting body are the only visible sign of what is thought to be the world’s largest organism. As was first recognised in 1992, its single subterranean mycelium is more than 2000 years old and extends possibly as much as 10 square kilometres.

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40 | NewScientist | 7 December 2013

though. “They are remarkable chemists,” says Boddy. The mycelium is also the fungus’s chemical powerhouse, secreting enzymes that break down surrounding organic material – or even rocks – and so release the nutrients into the soil. Many fungi also produce volatile chemicals to defend their territory against bacteria, insects and other fungi.

Boddy’s speciality is wood-decaying fungi. “They are good fighters,” she says. In her lab, she observes the elaborate strategies they develop to ensure they are first in the buffet

queue to feed on juicy dead wood, including throttling each other’s mycelia and producing clouds of chemicals to beat back competitors.

The chemical activity of some mushrooms has long been held in high esteem. There’s the effects of magic mushrooms containing the psychoactive ingredient psilocybin and, more prosaically, the antibacterial properties of the soil-dwelling genus Penicillium. Mutual antagonism between fungal species has also been exploited, for example in the use of Phlebiopsis gigantea spores to control Heterobasidion annosum, a major cause of root rot in conifer plantations.

Gary Strobel, a microbiologist at Montana State University in Bozeman, thinks there are many more possibilities. A decade ago, while on a field trip to an area of ancient forest in Patagonia, he found a wood-decaying fungus

whose chemical fug seemed to consist largely of volatile organic compounds of the sort found in diesel fuel. The fungus has since been identified as a strain of Ascocoryne sarcoides – commonly known as jelly drops on account of its purple, gelatinous fruiting bodies. Back in Bozeman, Strobel built a reaction vessel like an overblown kitchen sink to see if he could get it to do the same in the lab.

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“Jelly beans” (right) might make good biofuel, while honey mushrooms (below right) can stretch for miles underground

After the Stone, Iron and plastic ages – are we set for the Mushroom Age?

” Fungi are good fighters, throttling each other and making clouds of chemicals to beat back competitors”

There’s one area in which fungi have rarely been out of fashion: fashion itself. Particularly headwear. New Scientist’s interest in mushroom millinery was first piqued by a letter in which a reader referred us to a remarkable claim made of giant puffball mushrooms in a 1960s children’s book (22 June, p 64). “Large fungi of this kind,” the book declared baldly, “can be made into men’s hats, and they are very light and comfortable.”

It’s an appealing idea. Like oversized golf balls, giant puffballs, or Calvatia gigantea, can grow up to 1.5 metres across. Sadly, it is almost certainly a case of mistaken identity. Mushroom hats of the sort worn by mycologist Paul Stamets (see main story) are made not from puffballs, but from amadou. This felt-like substance is derived from horse hoof fungus or Fomes fomentarius, a bracket fungus that grows predominantly on beech and birch trees. Amadou can also be used as tinder or fish bait, but the tradition of making it into hats has survived only in a few spots in central and eastern Europe.

If mushroom millinery is not to your taste, perhaps other fungal clothing may suit you better. The inhabitants of some South Pacific islands make dresses from rhizomorphs. These fungi form networks that dangle from tree branches, catching leaves and other falling organic material to consume before it reaches the forest floor.

Fungal garments have even made it to the catwalk. A couple of years ago, designer Ninela Ivanova of Kingston University in London visited Lynne Boddy’s lab at Cardiff University, UK, to learn how to grow mushrooms in culture. She has since incorporated live fungal moulds into dresses and vests, displayed at London Fashion Week in 2011, that allow the wearer to observe the whole fungal life cycle from growth to decay. The aim is not only to develop sustainable materials based on fungi, but to give mushrooms an image makeover. “We are looking to inspire a positive shift in the social perception of these organisms,” says Ivanova.

On a more macabre note, the US artist Jae Rhim Lee is designing a funeral suit made from a strain of flesh-eating fungus that helps the body to decompose. The artist hopes her invention will encourage people to come to terms with their own demise. Either that, or they won’t be seen dead in a piece of fungal fashion.

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that took just three weeks to turn dead leaf matter into a serviceable “mycodiesel” fuel. “I’ve put it into my motorbike and it works just fine,” he says. Unlike conventional ways of making biofuels, such as using yeast to ferment cash crops into ethanol, this process could potentially feed off freely available agricultural waste. Strobel is now working to commercialise the idea.

Eben Bayer thinks this fungal fuel might one day power a mushroom motor. CEO of a company called Ecovative, he made his name with biodegradable mushroom packaging, supplying the computer giant Dell among others. But he doesn’t stop there. “If you think plastics are a wonder material, mycelium should be in that same category,” he says.

Like plastic, mycelium is formed of a flexible polymer material, in this case chitin. It’s fully biodegradable – and smart to boot. Given different starting materials, temperatures and humidity, it can be coaxed to grow to different densities and orientations and so produce materials with a wide range of properties such as tensile strength. “We point it in the right direction and it takes care of the details,” says Bayer. His company is currently cooking up projects from medical implants that make synthetic bone using mycelium as a scaffold to

fire-resistant insulating foam – and even moulded mushroom parts for electric cars.

For Stamets, such solutions are small mushroom fry. While the hats he wears are a symbol of mushroom technologies past (see “Mushrooms à la mode”, far left), he sees us marching towards a sunlit fungal future. In 2008 he gave a talk at a TED conference entitled “Six ways mushrooms will save the world” that has since been viewed 1.7 million times and counting. “He is the epitome of mushroom fame,” says Bayer.

“The path to the future is the path of the mycelium,” says Stamets. It sounds like cod philosophy, but his company, Fungi Perfecti, has amassed more than 30 mushroom-based patents spanning a range of environmental and medicinal applications. His biggest idea is “mycorestoration”: applying what he describes as “guilds” of appropriate fungi to soil to enhance productivity, clean up contamination and speed up carbon

sequestration to mitigate climate change.Other inventions include “mycobooms”,

floating hemp socks filled with mycelium that secrete oil-destroying enzymes in contaminated water. His most recent patents are on what he claims is a universal insecticide and an antiviral substance derived from the wood-decaying fungus Laricifomes officinalis, commonly known as agarikon or quinine conk, owing to its extremely bitter taste.

Fuels, medicines, materials, environmental clean-up services – the breadth of potential fungal applications is underlined by a banner on the website of Bayer’s company. After the Stone Age, various metal ages and the plastic age, it declares, “welcome to the Mushroom Age”. That’s not entirely tongue-in-cheek, says Bayer. “We’re actually pretty serious about that.”

Stamets is even more definite. If we want a quick, easy fix to problems of human health, environmental degradation and the drivers of climate change, we need to embrace the suite of services offered by our fungal brethren – and fast. “Time is short, very short,” he says. And if it doesn’t work, he’ll eat his hat. n

Richard Webb is New Scientist’s deputy features editor

” Different ’guilds’ of fungi could be added to soil to clean up contamination or speed carbon capture”

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