Fun with fungi

Fun With Fungi

(Find translations here)

1. Introduction

This is a Hackuarium Wiki Page on the "Fun With Fungi" project.

We hope to put more discussions and contributions into this Hackuarium Wiki very soon.

2. Key Topics

• What are fungi?

- any of diverse group of spore-producing organisms, which feed on organic matter, including moulds, yeast and mushrooms

RA's first attempt to grow mycelia on moss and also bullrush straw... The moss worked well!

• Mycelial Growth (can be on a variety of substrates and in 'in vitro' or liquid cultures)

• DNA-Sequencing of fungi (with first results already)

• How fungi communicate
• Save the bees (with fungi). A follow up of the Hackuarium "BeeMos" and ''OpenFoodRepo DNA'' projects

3. Participatory Research

Yngvar at a mushroom conference!  Please note all the samples on the table behind him!

We hope to do more metagenomic analyses for participatory research on mycelial biodiversity, including the intriguing possibility that mycelia might help save the bees!

Our latest crowdfunding campaign launched on 8Feb23, and we hope it helps us do this seriously, to allow not only extraction of complex samples and MinION kits etc needed for the barcoding, as for our OpenFoodRepo DNA work... but also growth of mycelia on beehive inserts, to provide for bees, to test how they might help bees prosper, as previously published work by other mushroom experts suggests.)

Happily, the campaign reached its budget goal, and our Kickoff Workshop was held on Earth Day, 22 April 23 from 14-17h!

French text translated from the #mycelia4bees campaign.

Here is a French Translation of the main text from the campaign, which a friend shared... =)

This is how we put it in the fb event:

(EN below)

Atelier de biomatériaux avec mycéliums.

Nous avons prévu de passer en revue les différentes façons de cultiver les champignons, et les participants vont repartir avec un objet spécial qu'ils ont fabriqué.
Biomaterials workshop with mycelia.

We plan to review different ways to grow mushrooms, and participants will leave with a special object they have created!

Special news:

• For the Swiss Mycologists 'Wissenschaftliche Kommission' - we did mushroom DNA preparation and mITS1/4 pcr on 2023.10.03 for seqs. From 10ul reactions, we had enough DNA for results from 8 of 8 of the samples run, confirming identifications of the group.

Another bit of news: A Swiss beekeeper with problems around a problematic microbe, Ascospaera, that mummifies larval worker bees, causing the serious problem 'couvain calcifié' (in french), had sent us some samples, and RA did some molbio and got the expected species sequence of it as, Ascosphaera apis (one seq trace is shown in the Gallery below...), while Olivier was thinking about some competition experiments of it and Fomes fomentarius...

See Gallery below.

Further Fun!

Mycelia are also great inspiration for bioart works and biostructural and food ideas to help reduce carbon footprints... Here is a new page to collect recent biostructure work and information.

Around this project we have also helped launch a new community biolab, Thyrea Biofablab, with a fungal-themed biofest. Additionally, we have some results on their growth patterns in petri dishes... Light indeed, as suspected, makes a difference!

We are also going to see if the growth on cigarette butts, to detoxify them, can be replicated in our lab. Here is an academic paper around this idea. Our first culture has already been made (butts collected outside and sterilised in our pressure cooker), comparing oyster mushroom growth on the cigarette butts to growth on sterilised moss. (added one picture to the gallery, so far, late october 2023)

You can get involved, too!

Gallery

• 

  new plates made from first

• 

  mycelia collected

• 

  Three mITS1/4 bands cut out for purification and sequencing

• 

  Growth on new plates

• 

  P is for pupe, B is for black, W is for white...

• 

  sequence trace is quickly weak, but still highly significant... (2e-174!)

• 

  pleurotes growing on cigarette butts (16days post inoculation)

• 

  'fruit bowls' from another workshop getting a bit more growth