Mycological musings

I’ve recently acquired the time to explore a new interest. More importantly, two friends who are game for a hobby that I’d intended to start years ago: mushroom hunting. The accumulated drive has carved into my schedule like the Missoula floods carved North Am´erica from Minnesota through the PNW. Alas, my second post is /not/ an enzdes tutorial just yet. I am making progress towards the enzdes project: I’m reading a few papers on emerging pollutants of concern [1] and microplastic degradation, [2] when I came across this passage in [2]:

”"”Fungi are members of 10 genera of the Ascomycota and Mucor, and they degrade polyethylene more quickly than bacteria. The crucial factor causing this distinction is that fungi can adhere to polymer surfaces with hydrophobic surfaces. When using PP and PE as the sole carbon source, it may be possible to culture Aspergillus, Fusarium oxysporum, and Penicillium for three months to test their capacity for degradation. The analysis also validates the presence of biofilms and reveals alterations to PP and PE’s surface. The incubated fungus are also examined, and it is shown that they can survive for more than three months without any extra carbon sources [64]”””

The =[64]= citation is [3], for your reference. My interest was instantly piqued and I needed to learn more, so I foraged for books on the subject and it’s occupied a lot of my time since. I just bought a microscope for this hobby! It has a camera! I’m excited.

I hope to write more about my experience here. I just learned that mushrooms have quite the protein content, making them an excellent candidate for meat replacement, and boasting apparently other health benefits. Somehow I somehow evaded this information for years while also being vegan. I remembered the many departmental talks on dynamic actin networks in grad school, and reasoned since the fruiting body springs up rapidly (overnight) that they must be rich in actin filaments. Surely that explains the high protein content. So, inhibiting actin must “break” fruiting, right? That led me to this article: [4]

“[fungal] secondary metabolites [include] cytochalasans, small-molecule bioactive hybrid compounds synthesized in concerted action by a polyketide synthase and a non-ribosomal peptide synthetase (PKS-NRPS) … They are well known to occur throughout different taxonomic orders, such as the Xylariales, Sordariales, and Diaporthales, amongst others, in the phylum of the Ascomycota.”

Perhaps I should have expected us to boomerang back to assembly-line enzymes. A surprise to be sure, but a welcome one! Cytochalasan biosynthesis must be conserved, or maybe it’s convergent evolution. I’ll have to BLAST it.

I hope to carry out experiments alongside mushroom imaging. Spore prints seem deceptively easy to get started doing, and if I capture high-resolution images of those prints I can take measurements of all sorts of minutiae. Naively, I think I’m very interested in sporulation and spore morphology, via visible light microscopy, image analysis, and perhaps mass difference of the cap before and after spore-printing. Eventually I want to do some /really/ interesting experiments, such as analyzing the molecular contents of an organic-phase extract from each species I come across with some kind of spectrometer (Raman? IR? Mass spectrometer) or exploring fungal molecular biology.

Stay tuned! And thanks for reading.

Citations:

1. Bilal, M., Adeel, M., Rasheed, T., Zhao, Y. & Iqbal, H. M. N. Emerging contaminants of high concern and their enzyme-assisted biodegradation - A review. Environ Int 124, 336–353 (2019).
2. Cai, Z. et al. Biological Degradation of Plastics and Microplastics: A Recent Perspective on Associated Mechanisms and Influencing Factors. Microorganisms 11, 1661 (2023).
3. Wróbel, M.; Szyma ́nska, S.; Kowalkowski, T.; Hrynkiewicz, K. Selection of microorganisms capable of polyethylene (PE) and polypropylene (PP) degradation. Microbiol. Res. 267, 127251 (2023).
4. Lambert, C. et al. Cytochalasans and Their Impact on Actin Filament Remodeling. Biomolecules 13, 1247 (2023).