You Didn’t Know Mushrooms Could Do All This | National Geographic

There are so many things you can do with fungi, and this is what keeps us up at night. Fungi for food, medicine, textiles, fiber, packaging materials, even biofuel. Fungi just have this potential to unlock biological material that's a waste product in our civilization and convert it into something else. So that's what's exciting, and everyone's like scampering onto this bandwagon to try to catch up.

I started as a grower, and I was out collecting edible mushrooms. That would be all I was interested in: the edibility, the economic factor. You know, I can sell this mushroom and make money. This one's definitely sellable; it smells really good. It's just untapped completely—that one, that's the best one. And all in the meantime, I'm focused on this one mushroom in the woods while there I’m passing thousands, and I've got my blinders on.

Next, now all I'm interested in is all those little brackets. We have a lot of species of fungi here in the lab, and there's one and a half million species plus of fungi on the planet. Effectiveness—do we need to concentrate it somehow? Can we store it? Kind of my plan or theory is that when you have an infection, and you're either not sure what the bacteria is or you know that that bacteria is drug-resistant, we don't have a really perfect treatment that you could take.

That bacteria could inoculate the mushroom. So, put it on the mushroom, and the mushroom would then sweat out these metabolites. Those metabolites would basically be able to kill that bacteria. So, it's like a personalized antibiotic production system for your infection. Knowing the problems we have with antimicrobial resistance, something like this is coming out of a different perspective and saying, "Look, let's take advantage of what the natural world can already do." To me, that's just fascinating.

I think it's unlimited what we could do with mushrooms once we know more about the different varieties that are out there and more about their biology in general. Right now, Haiti has been completely deforested, and so part of the process of developing requires building materials. There is an urgency to go out and find new sustainable products, and I think this has a really big potential to be one of those.

We're looking at compression strength, tensile strength, flame retardant, its ability to act as insulation. The fungi has so many properties: healing properties, antibiotic properties—it's lightweight, it's a great source of protein. It will be able to filter all sorts of pathogens and chemicals out of our water system. The amount of potential solutions that we have for fungi is tremendous.

Good girl about this one, it's her favorite. You open one door, there's 10 doors. Then you open up that one, and it's 100. And all these have not been explored yet. This is just the beginning. We're not sure why the fungi bioluminesce, and that's what we're trying to do right now—let's figure out why.