Fungus... making uranium safe again and eating radiation

I know this is sort of getting ridiculous but here's yet ANOTHER story about the amazing abilities of fungi to bioremediate. This time it's depleted uranium. A product of the military-industrial complex and its unending wars this heavy metal is found in the soil of a battlefield where armor piercing bullets were fired. But long after the killing has stopped, this heavy metal remains, leaching into groundwater, getting taken up into plants and animals, and making its way into people where it poses a serious threat of toxicity.

Along come mushrooms whose filamentous network of mycelium can colonize the uranium and via oxidation convert it into a stable mineral form, uranyl phosphate. While still hazardous (just as uranium ore is hazardous) this new chemical configuration is not bio-active, making it much more difficult for the uranium to get into humans or the groundwater.

This is great news and really underscores just how important microorganisms are in effecting soil composition and ecosystem health.

This story has some pretty interesting overlap with a report published last year that found fungus can actually convert radiation energy into biomass. It does this through the chemical melanin (found in your skin) that can capture ionizing radiation into chemical energy, much as a green plant uses chlorophyll to accomplish the same thing but with a different portion of the electromagnetic spectrum.

So maybe the fungus that can take uranium out of the bio-cycle are actually using the metal as an energy source, a sort of mini nuclear reactor that it can tap into and at the same time process the waste. Genius!




http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/05/070522210932.htm


http://www.physorg.com/news129181478.html

Mushrooms to clean up dioxin in Fort Bragg California

I am a huge proponent of myco-remediation and I often incorporate a bio-remediation stage in site development proposals. That's why I was just tickled pink to read this article in the NYTIMES today.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/27/us/27bragg.html

The legacy of the large timber industry that once owned northern California is large tracts of contaminated land where their mills once stood. In the case of Fort Bragg the municipality was given rights to a 420 acre strip of seashore land that came with a typical toxic-soils caveat... they could have the land only if they dealt with the contamination, specifically five hot-spots that had high levels of dioxin. the options tabled to deal with the soil were either to haul the dirt away, or bury it in a lined landfill on site.

but then they contacted Paul Stamets, mushroom-guru cum-savvy eco-business warrior, and he suggested turkey tail & oyster mushrooms (medicinal tea & stir-frys, respectively). Dioxin (C₄H₄O₂) is an organic molecule with no heavy metals or radioactive isotopes, and as such it's ripe fodder for the tenacious mushroom mycelium that can break apart the chemical bonds and convert the basic atomic building blocks of carbon and hydrogen into rich mushroom proteins & sugars.

The Fort Bragg community voiced their support and were given a few yards of dioxin contaminated soil & facilities to conduct a myco-remediation experiment. It might be some years before we know for sure how well this works, but it's hopeful to see otherwise dangerous contaminants being turned not only into benign substances but straight into medicine and food.

For those who missed it, the recent San Francisco oil spill, resulting from an inebriated bar pilot slamming a tanker into the footing of the Bay Bridge, was cleaned up using mats made of human hair donated by the city's stylists and barbers. The mats were then hauled off and DIGESTED... oil & all, by oyster mushrooms, also provided by Paul Stamets.

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/11/14/MNPQTBLE4.DTL

and finally here's the first board from my final project last year where I proposed deconstructing the 101 Freeway in the Presidio and digesting the asphalt using mushrooms.