Ohio: fungusan integral component of the Earth’s biological systemhave been used for a long time to improve human life. While these creatures are still mostly unknown, a new research report argues that their distinct genomes could be used to advance the biotechnology sector.
“The wonderful thing about fungus is that they fill so many niches,” said Mitchell Roth, lead author of the review and an assistant professor of plant pathology in it Ohio State University. “They can be found everywhere, and many times you’ll find fungi that have already adapted to survive in unlikely environments.”
Recently, scientists have made incredible advances in the field, and thanks to the popular HBO adaptation The Last of Us, mushrooms may finally get the recognition they deserve, Roth said. “There is a lot of potential in fungal biotechnology that we haven’t used,” he said. “We’ve only scratched the surface of fungal biotechnologySo this document is a bit like a call to action.”
Advances in fungi have already led to breakthroughs in a variety of industrial and domestic settings, most notably in medicine through the development of new drugs (such as penicillin or lovastatin) as biological control against pathogens, and in society. when used to ferment certain foods and drink.
The article, published in the journal Frontiers in Fungal Biology. highlights how further research in the field of mycology, the study of fungi, could aid in the discovery and application of many emerging biotechnologies.
For example, intertwining biotechnology and mycology could stimulate the development of sustainable bioinformatics and biomaterials tools, such as machine learning algorithms to predict mycological patterns or the creation of fungal batteries. Also, because fungi are so common, promising biotechnologies are likely to be produced on a large scale.
But Roth, who works at the Wooster campus of Ohio State’s College of Food, Agricultural and Environmental Sciences, focuses on how some fungi become pathogens and spread disease. He said many of these potential leaps have only been possible because of advances in scientists’ ability to sequence their DNA.
“By comparing the genomes of different fungi, you can really start to understand which genes are involved in which processes,” he said. “Now you can go to the lab, study them, change some genes, and make a fungus even better at doing a specific task.”
But that’s not to say that researchers don’t face any challenges in their quest to develop uses for the mushrooms. Due to the variety of sizes of fungal genomes and their repetitive genetic sequences, the study notes that it has been difficult to identify and study them in their entirety. Only because of the advent of long-read sequencing technologies like Nanopore and PacBio, which now allow for the sequencing of longer pieces of DNA, has fungal genetics research become so broad, Roth said.
Still, while being able to manipulate fungal genomes would be beneficial to various tech industries, such breakthroughs are unlikely to happen without a significant amount of time, funding, and technology support.
“Scientists may have all these ideas and curiosities about fungi and want to study them further, but it’s really challenging and very expensive,” Roth said. “And unfortunately, people aren’t always aware of what we can do with them.”
Co-authors on the paper were Nathaniel Westrick of the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Thomas Baldwin of North Dakota State University.
