We've seen fungi being used to create useful new materials for construction, fire-retardant building insulation, and even 3D-printed batteries.
One of the researchers behind that last doozy, Dr. Gustav Nyström, and his colleague Ashutosh Sinha from the Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Science and Technology (EMPA) have cracked a whole new way to leverage the strange and magical properties of fungal mycelium. They've developed a new material that incorporates living cells, so it's biodegradable and can help break down waste too. Oh, and you can eat it, if you're curious like that.
For this work, the researchers chose a particular strain of the split-gill mushroom – which typically grows on dead wood – and used the entire fungus rather than just the root-like mycelium. This strain produces two macromolecules with peculiar and useful properties: one collects at interfaces between liquids that don't mix, and the other is a nanofiber that's a thousand times longer than its sub-nanometer thickness.
With these features in play, the team managed to created a stable edible emulsion, which could be used to preserve food and cosmetics or improve their texture.
They could also be used to make biodegradable moisture sensors and fungal biobatteries that will be safe to embed in natural environments.
The researchers also created a thin film with high tensile strength, which means it can be stretched or made to bear heavy loads without tearing. Since the mycelium is a biodegrader, it could be used to make living plastic bags for food waste. "Instead of compostable plastic bags, it could be used to make bags that compost the organic waste themselves," Sinha noted.
That could help speed up the process of reducing food waste from cities, and make it safer to dispose of organic material in the first place. In some developing countries like India, nonbiodegradable plastics are used to make waste bags that not only stay in the soil for decades after they're trashed, but are also digested by cows and other animals that feed on garbage. A better trash bag would be a welcome addition to disposal methods.
The researchers' study appeared in the journal Advanced Materials in February. Hopefully we'll see more applications of this living material realized and commercialized in the not-too-distant future.
Source: EMPA