How Mushrooms Can Save the World

Crusading mycologist Paul Stamets says fungi can clean up everything from oil spills to nuclear meltdowns.

http://discovermagazine.com/2013/julyaug/13-mushrooms-clean-up-oil-spills-nuclear-meltdowns-and-human-health#.UqGzpidTDoa

By Kenneth Miller|Friday, May 31, 2013

Pioppino mushrooms (Agrocybe aegerita) induced tumor regression, reversing cancer in lab mice. The species also controlled blood sugar in diabetic mice.

Stuart Isett

For Paul Stamets, the phrase “mushroom hunt” does not denote a leisurely stroll with a napkin-lined basket. This morning, a half-dozen of us are struggling to keep up with the mycologist as he charges through a fir-and-alder forest on Cortes Island, British Columbia. It’s raining steadily, and the moss beneath our feet is slick, but Stamets, 57, barrels across it like a grizzly bear heading for a stump full of honey. He vaults over fallen trees, scrambles up muddy ravines, plows through shin-deep puddles in his rubber boots. He never slows down, but he halts abruptly whenever a specimen demands his attention.

This outing is part of a workshop on the fungi commonly known as mushrooms — a class of organisms whose cell walls are stiffened by a molecule called chitin instead of the cellulose found in plants, and whose most ardent scientific evangelist is the man ahead of us. Stamets is trying to find a patch of chanterelles, a variety known for its exquisite flavor. But the species that stop him in his tracks, and bring a look of bliss to his bushy-bearded face, possess qualities far beyond the culinary.

He points to a clutch of plump oyster mushrooms halfway up an alder trunk. “These could clean up oil spills all over the planet,” he says. He ducks beneath a rotting log, where a rare, beehive-like Agarikon dangles. “This could provide a defense against weaponized smallpox.” He plucks a tiny, gray Mycena alcalina from the soil and holds it under our noses. “Smell that? It seems to be outgassing chlorine.” To Stamets, that suggests it can break down toxic chlorine-based polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs.

Most Americans think of mushrooms as ingredients in soup or intruders on a well-tended lawn. Stamets, however, cherishes a grander vision, one trumpeted in the subtitle of his 2005 book, Mycelium Running: How Mushrooms Can Help Save the World. Mushroom-producing fungi, he believes, can serve as game changers in fields as disparate as medicine, forestry, pesticides and pollution control. He has spent the past quarter-century preaching that gospel to anyone who will listen.

HOW MUSHROOMS CAN SAVE THE WORLD

Radiation-Loving Fungi Can Remove Toxic Waste

By Reid Schram
Epoch Times Staff Created: October 2, 2011 Last Updated: October 5, 2011

Related articles: Science » Inspiring Discoveries

Gomphidius glutinosus is a common woodland mushroom that concentrates radioactive cesium-137 to over 10,000 times background levels. (Bernd Haynold/Wikimedia Commons)

When Russian scientists sent a robot into the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in 2007, the last thing they expected to find was life. Inside the most radioactive areas of the breached core was a group of common fungi collectively referred to as "black mold" growing on the reactor walls.
These molds were growing in one of the most hostile environments on the planet, with radiation levels high enough to give a lethal dose in minutes. But these fungi weren’t just growing, they were thriving.
A researcher at New York’s Albert Einstein College of Medicine, Arturo Casadevall, investigated these resistant molds and helped to identify several distinct species.
They all shared one very interesting characteristic—they all contained the skin pigment melanin.
Perhaps the most interesting was a common species of black mold, Cryptococcus neoformans. This fungus does not normally contain melanin, but when exposed to radiation levels 500 times higher than background radiation, it would start producing melanin within 20 to 40 minutes.

Cryptococcus and other species grow faster in high radiation environments then their counterparts do at normal amounts of radiation. Casadevall’s work led to the discovery that the fungi use melanin to capture energy given off by ionizing radiation, rather like plants use chlorophyll to capture sunlight.

The radiation levels here on Earth have historically been much higher than they are today. Large amounts of highly melanized fungal spores have been found in early Cretaceous period deposits, a time when a massive global plant and animal die-out occurred.

One suggested cause of this mass extinction is that the Earth’s protective magnetic field became weakened or overwhelmed. This would have allowed excessive cosmic and solar radiation into our atmosphere for most life forms to survive.

But what would have been a bane for the majority of life on Earth would have been a boon for melanin-containing fungi.

Radiation-loving mushrooms, scientifically referred to as "radiotrophic fungi," have many potential applications. In 1987, at the Chernobyl disaster site, highly contaminated graphite used to cool the reactor was observed being decomposed by a yet unknown species of fungi.
Various species of fungi are also capable of concentrating different heavy metals. After the Chernobyl meltdown, mushroom hunters all over Europe were advised not to pick and eat certain species of fungi because they could be concentrating radioactive fallout.


Gomphidius glutinosus is a common woodland mushroom that concentrates radioactive cesium-137 to over 10,000 times background levels. An area that has been contaminated with deadly cesium, like the area surrounding the Fukushima nuclear power plant in Japan, could have spores from this species of fungi spread on it, and then later when the radioactive mushroom caps appeared, they could be collected and properly disposed of.

Using fungi to clean up radioactive or other types of waste is an emerging technique known as mycoremediation, and promises to be far less expensive than other competing methods.

http://www.theepochtimes.com/n2/science/radiation-loving-fungi-can-remove-toxic-waste-62299.html