Hundreds of millions of years ago, they began to colonize the emerging lands, lurking inside trees and other plants, creeping through the soil. They have gradually expanded their invisible realm. Neither animals nor plants.
Mushrooms are part of one of the largest kingdoms in nature, the fungi kingdom. It is a diverse family, featuring giants larger than a white whale, and in far greater number, lily pushions the size of a speck of dust. They survived the great ice ages, the waves of massive species extinction, and the advent of the first humans by developing a unique form of intelligence that has enabled them to adapt to the most extreme conditions and colonize just about every ecological environment.
Now fungi are spreading their filaments into the world's laboratories, where their prodigious talents as builders, conductors, network engineers and chemists are inspiring researchers. Some scientists already dream of harnessing the amazing capacities of these primitive yet highly sophisticated organisms to solve burning issues such as soil pollution, desertification, and even the fragility of telecommunications networks. No sooner are our backs turned than hordes of fungi invade our plates and turn even the finest dishes to mold.
This vile habit probably explains why fungi have inspired such fear and disgust through the ages. Yet when some simple mold on a melon produced penicillin in the late nineteen thirties, an event that saved millions of lives, people began to look at fungi in a different light. Gorgeous.
They now seem to have found themselves some worthy ambassadors. One of the most charismatic being American mycologist Paul Stamets. After decades getting to know fungi and their powerful molecules very closely, his mind is buzzing with ideas of how they might be used, the medical sector being only one of many.
What if fungi didn't just heal humans but the environment too? One of my great realizations in life is that habitats have immune systems just like we do, but mushrooms are the bridges between the two. With the knowledge that we have now, and it's just not myself, but there's several thousand other mycologists around the world, we have a deep sense that these fungi and mushrooms have evolved in a way that creates sustainable habitats.
And without sustainable habitats, you and I are not going to exist. And so these mushrooms have a mothering influence in creating habitats that give us food, medicine, and ecosystems that are sustainable. What do we actually know about fungi?
Apart from the glimpse we get of a stem and cap peeking furtively out of the forest leaf litter. For their real nature remains hidden away beneath our feet in the form of extremely dense networks that sometimes stretch for dozens of kilometers in every direction. Paul Stamets is convinced that it is the white mats of mycelium that concentrate fungi's major powers and greatest promises.
There's mycelium virtually everywhere. It's all underneath the soil here. You can see this white mycelium, and this mycelium gives rise to the mushrooms.
And so, see, it's connected. And so this mycelium generates the mushroom. The mycelium also has a terroir.
It's a fantastic fragrance. And the mycelium forms islands, and they're very dense. And they gobble up and eat the debris coming from trees, and they make soil ultimately.
But these are mycelial lenses that are moving through habitats all the time. And so the soil environment is very dynamic. It's in constant motion all the time.
And so we have a very provincial view of nature. We walk upon a habitat, footstep after footstep. Every time we take a footstep, the mycelium leaps up afterwards.
So when I step down and I walk over, the mycelium leaps up in the aftermath of your footsteps, trying to eat the new wood debris and sticks that you've created. Nothing can halt these thin mycelial threads, which do not stick to the surface but work their way right into the heart of even the hardest materials. Without their tireless devotion to decomposition, the planet would long have been buried under tons and tons of organic debris.
So why not exploit their amazing ability to rid us of toxic waste, which is after all just another fungal feedstock? That was Paul Stamets' premise when he invented mycorrhemediation, a soil decontamination technique that uses the mycelium of some decomposer fungi. That process of decomposition, a form of molecular disassembly, these things unravel and break down large molecules into smaller ones that are very useful for other members in the ecological community.
That course of that decomposition has many different properties that we can use for breaking down toxic waste. And so at the time when the earth is suffering from toxin exposure, erosion of habitats, overpopulation, deforestation, loss of soil integrity, mushrooms present themselves with unique properties that can address all those problems with a single group. And that's what I find so exciting is that the solutions are literally underfoot.
That looks good, Jay. Ecotoxicologist Meg Pinzer has been collaborating with Paul Stamets on mycorrhemediation experiments for many years. Just keep adding the contaminated sediment.
To ensure that mycelium concentrates on consuming highly toxic petroleum derivatives called PAHs, it is strained in a kind of high-speed gastronomic induction course using a few wood chips as an appetizer. Should we add the rest of it to the top? Sure.
So this bowl over here contains sediment that's contaminated with PAHs. And the thought behind the mid-scale experiment is that you grow the mycelium that's infused in these alder chips in the presence of the contaminated soil, which is the material right here, the dark black material. And the idea is you want to sandwich the fungal chips in between the contaminated sediment.
So if you put a layer of the mycelium on the bottom and a layer on the top, in the course of about a week or two, the mycelium are going to grow together and find each other. And by doing that, they're growing through the contaminated sediment, which is the black material shown here. And as they do this, they're literally eating the PAHs that are in the sediment.
The fungal strains Meg Pinzer is straining have vast scope for action beyond the laboratory. There are hundreds of derelict industrial sites in the Pacific Northwest whose soils have built up hydrocarbon concentrations over the decades that are sometimes higher than in an oil slip. Environmental engineer Howard Sprouse has started a mycorrhemediation pilot project in one of these industrial wastelands, a former truck maintenance depot.
Looks like you're a little frozen. In the laboratory, many, many, many types of compounds have been degraded by many different types of mushrooms. As soon as you take those mushrooms outside into the big world, where they have to compete with all of the other organisms that are present in the soil, and where they have to be able to live in all kinds of environments, this separates the ones that can do the job in the lab effectively from the ones that work outside.
These mushrooms are alive. And when we put this into the soil, we're putting this organism into the soil, and it's staying alive. And this is what it does in nature.
In nature, these mushrooms are growing in the soil three hundred and sixty-five days out of the year. We're walking over the ground. We don't even know what's going on most of the time.
They're hungry, and they never stop eating. To give an idea of the decomposer fungus's greed, just one trailerful of wood chips inoculated with mycelium can decontaminate five times its own volume of polluted land. But what has become of the hydrocarbons?
What slate of hands has made the toxins disappear? The key to this riddle is to be found within the organism itself, in its matchless biological machinery. The reason that mycelium are all very good choice for remediation is they're a very hardy species.
They have a chitinous cell wall, which is very similar to a crab, that allows them to be able to proliferate in very hostile environments. So they can be in very extremes of temperature, hot or cold temperature. They can be in environments where it's high salinity to low salinity.
And this chitinous cell wall protects them from the toxicants and allows them to be in the same environment with the toxicants, but not be killed by the contaminant that they're with. These little white bubbles that you see on the screen are the extracellular enzymes. And this is really important, because this is how the mycelium will digest the oil.
It secretes these extracellular enzymes. The enzyme wave moves towards the oil, and it starts to break down the oil into smaller and smaller molecules. I find it truly amazing that something as simple as mycelium, the simple mycelium on the plate, has the power to break down contaminants that are so toxic and so problematic in the environment.
It's such an elegant process. I don't think we even really understand how it works. But we're basically just allowing the simple tool, this fungal system, to go out to the environment and make it much more beneficial for people to clean a site up.
And it's just hard to believe that it's such a simple, elegant little process that allows us to take something from a toxic state to a less toxic state. Why would we want to entrust soil decontamination to fungal enzymes rather than chemicals, which act faster, sometimes cost less, and work no matter the type of land? Yeah, that's good, Paul.
Yeah, bring her down a little for me. Howard Sprouse finds the answer when the process in an on-site trial area has been completed. Well, this is interesting.
We've got lots of worms in here now. That's a good sign. If it drops any more, we're going to be able to use this soil anywhere.
We've got composted mycelium here. It's got to be good for things. Let's see what it smells like.
Smells like soil to me. In micro-remediation technology, what you end up with here, the contaminant is gone. The fungi, when it's done its job, it dies.
And it, the decomposition process that the fungi have started is continued by other soil microorganisms, and you end up with soil that's richer than it was when you started. I predict in a year that you're going to look here, you're going to see, at the very least, this is going to be covered with grass. It's going to be greening up.
If you can visualize anything that you want to do with this property, it's going to be healthy enough to do it. At the end of the first set of experiments conducted by Paul Stamets and Meik Pinzer, magnificent clumps of fleshy oyster mushrooms had begun to grow on the previously polluted land. And unlike Snow White's apple, there was no trace of poison in their attractive white flesh.
Like a skilled conjurer, the fungus's enzymes have not just made the substances disappear, they have converted them into something else. Humans have exploited this amazing alchemy for thousands of years to produce staple foods ranging from bread to brioche, miso to sake, and beer to Roquefort cheese. Now, though, fungal enzymes are central to a growing number of industrial processes.
In these giant fermenting vats, Danish company Novozymes cooks up millions of hectolitres of enzyme soup that can be used for alternative ways of manufacturing paper and sunglasses, cosmetics and cardigans, not to mention washing powder that is supposed to wash whiter than white. In the multinational's Copenhagen laboratories, mycologist Mikhalko Sasa's job is to identify and test the most effective fungal enzymes. We have been producing enzymes for the detergent industry for many years, but sometimes the conditions can change.
And this is a very good example, because at least in this part of the world, we want to wash our clothes at a lower temperature. So the temperature of the water is hopefully going to be lowered. And that, of course, saves much more energy.
So that's a beautiful idea. But this means that we need to find new enzymes for the detergents. Even the most brilliant chemists have their specialist subjects.
Aspergillus and its amylases, Trichoderma and its cellulases, Humicola and its clackanases, Fusarium and its lipases. Welcome to the world of green chemistry. All of these fungi look very different, but not only do they look different, they are also physiologically very different, because they are all able to produce different types of enzymes.
So if we're looking for a cellulase, for example, we might want to look at a fungus like this. But if we're looking for a lipase, I would look at another fungus. Lipase is used, for example, in detergent, because you know that when you're cooking and making food, you might have some fatty stains on your clothes.
And those fatty stains are, of course, based on lipid. So if you have a lipase in your detergent, that would remove the lipid stain on your clothes. Back in the the the sixties, scientists at Novozymes discovered the famously greedy enzymes that made washing powders the epitome of domestic bliss, and they've been coming up with increasingly sophisticated enzymatic cocktails ever since.
Central to this research is Novozymes' greatest treasure. Tens of thousands of fungal strains slumber in a cloud of nitrogen. From the frozen wastes of Greenland to volcanic slopes and the jungles of Borneo, Mikhalko Sasa continuously seeks out species capable of surviving in the same extreme conditions as those found in industry.
Yet, the rare gem sometimes lingers just beyond the city limits. In an area like this, you would find thousands of species of fungi. And many of them would be undescribed, so we don't actually know what their names are, what they're called.
But wherever you go, there's fungi everywhere, whether it's in the cold, or whether it's in a desert, or whether you're, of course, in the subtropics and the tropics. So they're everywhere. It's just a question of how to find them and how to isolate them.
The water of a stagnant pool might contain an enzyme to soften the leather of a handbag's without the drawbacks of polluting chemicals. It still needs to be polished and tamed though. The task of transforming a simple enzyme into a stucanovite falls to protein designers.
They cut and paste and piece fungal enzymes together. For instance, they graft a protein that can resist extreme temperatures onto an enzyme capable of breaking down lipids. The result is a chimera, a superenzyme that combines various characteristics and perfectly replaces one of the links in the normal chemical chain.
So you could say that our society is highly based on oil. And I think that that is one application or one place where we can really replace that with enzymes instead. Many of the processes that are oil-based today in society.
And I think maybe one example would be finding bioplastics instead. And this is maybe even a good example. I use these petry dishes every day, which are, of course, made of plastic.
And we can maybe find a better solution instead of plastic based on enzymes. I'm sure that we will be finding all sorts of applications which can be replaced, all sorts of chemical, toxic chemical applications that can be replaced by enzymes from fungi. These fabulous fungal chemists now face a worthy challenge.
To develop less polluting green chemistry that enables us to produce in a different way the thousand and one objects we depend on in our daily lives. Yet, fungi already have their eye on the next lands to conquer, on other outdated models in need of radical reform. Fungi were long viewed as parasites and scroungers due to their annoying habit of getting everywhere.
An intensive agriculture has tried its best to hose the fields free of them with pesticides. But what if yesterday's foe were tomorrow's ally? Out in nature, there are millions of microscopic fungi invisible to the naked eye living inside plant roots.
And without this relationship known as mycorrhizal symbiosis, the vast majority of plants would simply not survive. Guillaume Becquart, the CNRS in Toulouse, examines plant roots from every angle to find out more about this unique partnership. I'm as fascinated now as when I started observing them twenty years ago.
I could spend hours doing it. I feel privileged because I'm one of very few people lucky enough to be able to see these roots and this fungus growing. Usually it's microscopic, totally invisible, inaccessible, underground, close to plants' root systems.
But here, we're discovering a new world. The yellow background that looks like a little checkerboard is a root. The green fluorescent stuff is the fungus.
It threads its way between the root cells and sometimes it colonizes them. colonizes the interior. So here, we see how far it is spread.
The fungus doesn't tip about. No, it actually enters the plant tissue and produces these arbuscules in one cell after another. It might seem paradoxical that a plant would willingly agree to be invaded by a fungus.
But in symbiosis, not only does the plant not discourage the intruder, it actually rolls up the red carpet for it. It lets the threads worm their way into the center of the root cells, creating highly ramified structures called arbuscules. Both partners have a vital interest in this close relationship because this greatly enlarged interface is where the plant trades the sugars from photosynthesis for the minerals and water the fungus has mined from deep down in the soil.
It is a truism that plants are immobile, static organisms that have to be able to make use of the available resources immediately around them. They can't look further afield for other resources. So they use the fungus to explore, prospect, mine, and retrieve water and essential minerals necessary for their growth.
Studies have even shown that plants can actually communicate with each other, meaning that they can exchange molecules and even carbon metabolites, using the fungus as a conduit, an organism to link them together. If we no longer wish to keep plants on an expensive chemical fertilizer drip, but instead help them use their fungal partners to make the most of soil resources, then it is essential we control the symbiotic process. To do that, though, we will need to break the code the fungus uses to communicate with the plant.
Do you speak funglish? Guillaume Becquart's team have learned how to by identifying the molecular signals, or myc factors, that open the path to symbiosis. Finding the right partner amid the teeming jungle of microorganisms living in the soil is a question of life or death for both the microscopic organism and the plant.
Like embedded spies, the two associates use an encoded language consisting of molecular chemicals to recognize each other and communicate. The plant diffuses a cloud of hormones designed to attract the right fungus. In response, the latter emits the famous myc factors, which warn the plant not to trigger its immune defense system and to push out the fine lateral route that makes the fungus's approach easy.
Our research work is part of a long-term project to try and find ways of using far lower quantities of phosphate fertilizer, without increasing yields, of course. So the stakes are high. Are my.
Factors are no silver bullet. But they could help us to exploit mycorrhizal symbiosis, even for major cereal crops. Real crops.
And. The scientists in Toulouse hope that reintroducing symbiotic fungus into fields will encourage a new green revolution capable of feeding the planet while also sustaining balanced ecosystems. In the Sahel Strip in northwestern Senegal, the hopes invested in these miniscule symbiotic fungi take various different forms.
Who would think that such an arid environment could harbor fungi? Yet there they are, spores lying dormant in the sand. Scientists are counting on an alliance with these hardy survivors in their work on the Great Green Wall, an ambitious Pan-African program that aims to reforest a seven thousand kilometer strip stretching from Dakar to Djibouti in order to push back the advancing desert.
It's hard to imagine that this teeny-weeny thing, this spore dust from the desert, might kick-start the vegetation cycle. Yet that is exactly what scientists at the Bel-Air Laboratory in Dakar, one of the Great Green Wall's rear bases, are banking on. These are simple experiments that involve selecting a certain number of strains and examining the plant's response to different fungal strains.
So as then to select the most efficient one, here on maize, back there on black-eyed peas and over there on rice. Then we move on to trials on jujube trees. The strain we've selected, Glomus aggregatum, is one we've bred.
We screened dozens of fungal strains, and this one proved most efficient. Glomus aggregatum, the fungus that survives in the sand, and the juju, a tree with particularly tasty fruit, appear to be so well-matched that Amadou Bar's team chose it as the pilot species for reforestation efforts. Glomus's stamina and its unique ability to connect offer the best chance of trees being able to flourish in even the most hostile conditions.
Mycorrhization will increase the survival rate of the young seedlings transplanted into the field. After a couple of years, the inoculated seedlings will obviously produce far more fruit than those that haven't been inoculated. The advantage of mycorrhizing the young seedlings is that it allows the plant to increase its root surface area and better absorb nutrients such as phosphorus and nitrogen from the soil.
The young seedlings and their Glomus partner look very frail. Yet they have the pioneers' enthusiasm as they set out on a vital mission to bring new life to the deserted lands that await them. After a long journey, the jujube trees and their fungal sidekicks arrive in Ferlo Province in the far north of Senegal.
Here, at one of the Great Green Wall experimental sites, they'll be able to test how this partnership stands up to the rigors of life in the wild. That's the Gola variety, which was fertilized with natural phosphate and inoculated. And that's the control batch of jujube trees that haven't been inoculated nor fertilized.
And those are the jujube seedlings that have only been inoculated with the fungus, with no phosphate added. Don't choose, just take six. The Ferlo pilot experiment offers a unique opportunity for the scientists from the laboratory in Dakar to test Glomus's effectiveness in these particularly arid and nutrient-poor sandy soils.
For the women from the neighboring village, the weedy saplings hold the promise of a vast orchard that will not only bring the benefits of the jujube trees, but also of other agricultural crops that will be able to grow in the shade of the trees. And lastly, after living for so long with only jujube trees for partners, Glomus has only one thing on its mind, to link up with any plant that can help it to expand its network. This network will expand beyond the jujube tree's root system.
The mycelium network is likely to go on to colonize other plants. It's easy to imagine this network transporting nutrients from the jujube tree to nearby vegetable crops as well as to agricultural crops like black-eyed peas. Feeding on the sugars it has obtained from the jujube trees, Glomus sends out new threads in search of other host plants with which it can continue trading.
It moves from one nearby plant to the next, linking them to form a plant community. The alliance between the tree and its fungal partners plays a critical role in this system, as it distributes minerals and sugars to where they need it. This gradually establishes a particularly effective underground trading system.
Each new plant contributes its sugar resources, and in exchange, benefits from the advantages of the network, which allows the latter to continue to expand ad infinitum. We'll probably begin to see fruits two years after planting. And so this experimental use of controlled mycorrhization of jujube trees could well spread to Senegal, Burkina Faso, Mali and other countries in the same zone facing desertification.
We'll see what happens. The fungal networks drafted in by the Great Green Wall project look like a good bet to turn the Sahel green again, following an age-old score that enabled plants to adapt to conditions on dry land hundreds of millions of years ago. In other parts of the world, proliferating fungal networks are infiltrating the world of new technology, as laboratories seek to counter the fragility of the many networks with that which modern society cannot operate.
The ingenious Fisarum polycephalum may not have graduated from a top university, but its incredible engineering talents persuaded Oxford University's Mark Fricker to enlist its help to improve traffic flows on Britain's rail network. So, we set up the slime moulds on these oat flakes, put them roughly where the major cities in the UK are, and let it grow. And it's formed a network, and the network looks a little bit like the rail network.
So we can see the radial routes coming out of London, we have going across towards Bristol in the West Country, and then we have the routes going up, the West Coast Line going up to Scotland through Preston, where it's about as far as the slime moulds manage to grow so far. up. .
. Quite apart from Fisarum's clever ability to reproduce in only forty-eight hours a rail network it took generations of engineers to perfect, Mark Fricker is intrigued and spurred on by the fact that Fisarum often made very different choices to those engineers. So in most cases we'll have a direct linkage that begins to form, so it chooses of all the possible paths, which is the shortest one.
Except, it will still have some additional cross connections in place. And that's the resilience. It costs more to have those extra links, but it means if any one of the links is broken, there's still another route that it can transfer material around.
Now that means that this point is connected to all of these, but it also has a shortcut that goes straight through the middle to connect it to those ones that are a long way away. So I think one of the very interesting things we may learn from these biological systems is what is the right amount of redundancy for the sorts of shocks that the system could experience. Sometimes it may be little shocks, you don't need much redundancy, but occasionally if there's a lot of damage that's happening, you would need more redundancy in the system, more alternative pathways.
So we don't know what the right level is for human systems, but we might learn the sorts of rules that biological organisms have employed. It's given by this equation, so there's. To uncover the laws that govern intelligent fungal systems, British researchers have established their own network, the fungal network.
Mathematicians, physicists, computer scientists, and biologists hope that by combining their different approaches, they will be able to highlight a certain number of constants or rules. But before anyone can come up with a magic formula that would revolutionise our networks, field investigations are needed to observe how fungi, in a highly competitive environment like a forest subsoil, are able to develop such efficient networks. We catch up with biologist Lynn Boddy, an expert on the architecture of mycelium networks in a Welsh forest, where she and her team are conducting a strange experiment.
Oh, I think this is going to be a big system. It's going to be difficult to excavate because it's going right down into the soil. So, shall we put the grid down first?
That's good. So, we've excavated this mycelial cord system. It's probably the fungus Megacolibia platyphylla, but we'll find that out later when we do DNA sequencing.
We're trying to map where all of the different regions are. We want to know how the fungus is connected to different organic resources. So, for example, in this case, that's an acorn.
There's another acorn there, a small piece of twig. These are all connected within the network. The fungus will be feeding off of these, and the nutrients within these resources will be translocated in the network and moved around the system.
This will help us to understand how nutrients are transferred from one part of the system to another part of the system, and how they can be protected against damage, and how, if they are damaged, they have different routes of translocation, of transport, of joining up within the network. This is probably just one small part of a very large mycelial network that extends through the forest floor. Nineteen centimetres.
Some fungal networks are capable of reaching staggering dimensions underground. For example, a Narmularia bulbosa discovered in Michigan, which over several thousand years had come to weigh as much as a whale and to cover no less than fifteen hectares. But why do fungi opt for star-shaped networks that may encompass such large areas?
If you look around, you can see branches and twigs scattered all over the place, but they're not touching each other, so there's a gap between them. There's a gap in space, and, of course, there's also a gap in time. They fall at different times of the year.
Fungal mycelia forage and search for these new resources. When they find them, they remodel their whole systems. They concentrate their efforts in the direction of success, where they've successfully counted resource, they make their mycelia grow there, and they regress from other regions.
So, the networks remodel all of the time. Mycelium networks are such an inspiration to scientists because they have the capacity to react instantaneously to changes in their environment. While human networks are constantly susceptible to a serious incident, fungi always appear to have built in an emergency exit.
To investigate their extraordinary and mysterious adaptability, Lynn Boddy is recreating a miniature version of forest conditions. This stratagem enables the scientist to observe a fungus like a laboratory mouse and see how it deals with different kinds of stress, such as the dispersion of available resources, damage caused by tiny invertebrates, or the destruction of part of its network. I've now completely removed the cord that connected these two woody resources, and we can ask several questions.
Does the fungus reconfigure the network? If the fungus originally sent the nutrients along that main route, does it now send them by a different way? It could send them along here, for example, or along this route, or along this one, and back along here.
This is the advantage of having a network. There are lots of different ways to get to the same place. So here we have the fungus growing out of a woodblock.
It doesn't know anything about the world around it. All it can do is grow. So as it grows, it's building up this network, it's exploring the space and trying to find more resource.
We don't really understand the decisions that it's making. How does it know to build a structure? It's very easy for us to look at it, but it's completely blind.
It's just exploring through space. At the same time it does that, the resources are all in the centre. The growth is all at the margin, so it must be able to transport the resources from the centre to the margin.
So solving that is quite a complicated problem. How do you make a network that is good at transporting things, is resilient to attack, but doesn't cost so much? Because if it costs a lot to make it, if it's very interconnected, it won't be able to explore very far.
The fungus's unbelievable architectural talents command admiration. But what is happening within the network? How does the organism go about distributing as ergonomically as possible the nutrients flowing through its narrow pipes?
Mark Fricker injected a radioactive marker into a mycelium network Lynn Boddy had supplied him with and made a strange discovery. The fungus follows its own particular logic and will sometimes choose to use only part of its network. Now when we add the radio label, we can see it being transported through these cords out to the edge of the network.
So lots of accumulation where that network is beginning to grow away. But the surprising thing is, there's almost nothing happening up there, and very little happening down here. We wouldn't have expected that, because if I superimpose on top the network structure that we've digitised, you can now see there's a lot of network up there that is getting almost no resource whatsoever.
So somehow the system has chosen, it's selected this region, and that's where the nutrients are going, that's the bit that's going to keep growing. This part will probably die back, and those nutrients will be recycled, and then used to give more growth over in that direction. Now we don't know whether that is a good solution, but we might infer, because if it does that, if it kept getting the decision wrong, it would have died out years ago.
And these are ancient organisms, they've been around a very long time. So we may infer that the solutions they reach are reasonable compromises. So if we understood the way that this self-organised system that doesn't know anything about the big picture, but on the local rules ends up with a good solution, we might be able to use those rules to help design other types of infrastructure networks.
Mycelium networks' qualities, robustness, adaptability, and self-organization resemble what we require of the new networks driving modern society. This is particularly true of internet and mobile telephone networks, which must be capable of adapting at any moment to sudden fluctuations in traffic and localized failures. Just as algorithms based on ant behavior help to optimize search engines, an increasing number of engineers and computer scientists believe that we can overcome some of the weaknesses of human networks by adding a dose of fungal intelligence.
We haven't really used that sort of approach in the design of most human networks. But it could be increasingly important if we want to make them less vulnerable to accidental damage or indeed any type of targeted attack. So again, we may be able to draw inspiration on these systems in biology that have been around for millennia.
These are ancient organisms, and they have found solutions if the type of threats that they face map onto the sorts of things that actually are relevant to human societies. And we don't know the answers to that yet. This is only the beginning.
Japanese scientists recently announced that they had isolated a new molecule from a tiny fungus, which proved particularly effective for treating certain autoimmune diseases. Biochemists at Yale University are investigating the properties of an Amazonian fungus that degrades polyurethane, a substance that cannot currently be recycled. Swiss researchers are banking on fungus proteins to offer a new means of manufacturing less polluting adhesives.
And all over the world, there is a race to find decomposer fungal enzymes that can help to produce second-generation biofuels. Considering that we have presently identified less than fifteen percent of all fungal species, and that some specimens among this multitude are bound to have unheard-of properties, you get a glimpse of the vast territories remaining to be explored, like distant galaxies.
