A Fungi At Parties

I have no idea why I haven't mentioned this before, but a recent conversation over at the Fray has tripped my memory and I wanted to share something incredibly fascinating, true believers.

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By this point, we have long be aware of photosynthesis, the process by which plants convert sunlight into a form of energy for their metabolic processes. The linchpin compound of that marvelous transmutation is a complex little molecule called chlorophyll, the name being derived from Greek words that translate roughly as "green leaf". Without going into a large amount of complex technical jargon, what it does is to allow a chemical reaction that synthesizes sugars (carbohydrates) out of carbon dioxide and hydrogen hydroxide (water). Now as awesome as that is, what I want to focus on here isn't the plant, but the light it uses.

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Sunlight...any light really, is just one of many forms of what is called "radiant energy". Most people associate the words with what is called "electromagnetic radiation" which is what we're talking about when referring to light or radio waves. Another part of that grouping however is "ionizing radiation" which is what most of us think of when we talk about nuclear power, weapons or radioactive waste.

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Nasty stuff, that waste. Lasts a long time...upwards of a million years in many cases. If you ever wondered why there is such a push back against nuclear power then here's your chief culprit. There have been years of debate about how to manage the stuff but the basic plan hasn't changed much; seal it, bury it and try to forget about it so you can get on with it.

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Getting back to the various forms of radiant energy however, I want to draw your attention to another nifty little chemical that deals with the stuff; you see, animals have to deal with exposure to all the same things that plants do and as we all know, animals don't have chlorophyll. Well, the overwhelming majority don't; we'll make an exception for our little friend Elysia chlorotica, whom I've mentioned before. So we of the animal kingdom developed a different, equally complex little molecule to handle the task called melanin. Well...we think we did.

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You see, we share this particular molecule with another bunch of critters who seem to have been using it in the same way. The Kingdom Fungi. Hence the picture of our little friend up there.

Now as it happens, we've long supposed that the mushrooms had been using melanin the same way we do: to protect themselves from levels of naturally occurring radiant energy, generally sunlight. I mean everyone likes a sunny day but too much of anything is bad for you; why else would we have invented sunblock? On the other hand, we know that fungi will grow in the dark so we can basically dismiss the idea that they use melanin as a part of their metabolic process, like plants do chlorophyll. Don't we?

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In May of 2007, an interesting little article found its way into Scientific America. A fellow named Arturo Casadevall notice something about the pools of water at a site he was studying. They would become contaminated with melanotic fungi.

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Okay, so what? There have always been various fungi that thrive in water. What makes these so special? It has to do with where the water was, where Casadevall's site was.

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Casadevall was performing research at the site of one of the worst radiative disasters in history occurred. He was in Chernobyl, Ukraine. The water pools were little ponds of highly irradiated water and the fungi, the ones that used melanin anyway, were going nuts. The hypothesis? Melanotic fungi like radiation.

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So where am I going with this? Well, it goes back to the question of what you do with the radioactive waste from a nuclear power plant. Obviously more experiments need to be conducted but, according to Casadevall and his associates, it seems that melanotic fungi are actually absorbing the radiation from their environment and storing it in a way that essentially neutralizes its harmful properties. Given our ability to engineer simple organisms, which is exactly what fungi are, it isn't hard to imagine an engineered fungi being used to breakdown radioactive waste products.

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In the current political climate, science is often disparaged by many Americans. They think that science is somehow out to get them, that it is going to destroy their lives which is ironic because it was science that enabled their way of life to begin with. The same people which are always clamoring for the next great achievement in weapons technology or cosmetic advancement are determined to undermine scientific endeavored in almost every other field. They love it for the bomb and hate for the radiation; now we are poised to begin undoing the radioactive nightmare the hunger for greater destructive power has unleashed upon us.

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Will they allow us the resources to do anything about it?