The Curious Tale of Dr. Scott and the Angel's Share Fungus.

[Kai]

"A triumph of taxonomy, both old and new." - Me

http://www.wired.com/magazine/2011/05/ff_angelsshare/all/1

When James Scott attended the first day of a mycology course as a freshman in college, his plan was to cut class for the rest of the semester and fake his way through on borrowed notes. But in his lecture that day, the professor told a story about a fungus that lives on peach pits. No one, he said, knows how the fungus gets from one pit to the next. "If you go to an abandoned orchard and lie on your stomach under a tree for a week, watching which insects land on a peach and move to another one," Scott remembers him saying, "you will know more about this fungus than anyone in the world."

"It was something even I, an undergraduate who didn't know anything, could do," Scott says. "I could go out there and look for stuff." In the space of one anecdote, Scott had become the sort of person who kept a microscope in his dorm room and decorated the walls with fungal family trees he drew himself. (He also plays the banjo.)

In Lakeshore, Scott found the black fungus as far as a mile away from the warehouse. And the closer it was, the thicker it grew, clinging like ashy cotton candy to walls, rooftops, even garden furniture. Under a microscope, it looked to be a mè9lange of different species, but much of it was thick-walled, rough-skinned stuff he'd never seen before. It looked like poorly hewn barrels, strung together end to end. Instantly, Scott realized where the distillery's other researchers had gone wrong. "They would have taken a sample and scraped it over a petri dish," Scott says. "And what would have grown were spores that just happened to be passively deposited." Common fungi were commingled with the mystery stuff in the sample, and the common fungi grew faster. Come back in a couple of weeks and the petri dish would be covered with boring, familiar species—leading to a false conclusion.

Scott had a better way to culture the samples. He ground them up and sprinkled them into a petri dish. But then he put the dish under the microscope and, using an impossibly fine needle, picked out fragments of the rough-skinned fungus and transplanted them to their own dishes. He figured that with no other fungi to compete with, the Lakeshore fungus would flourish.

He waited about a month, came back, and found ... not much of anything. Under a microscope the samples were clearly the same black barrel shapes. But his colonies were vanishingly small. Whatever it was, it wasn't growing like it grew around the warehouse.

Making growth media for fungi is really just feeding them a dish they like to eat. So, on a hunch, Scott bought a bottle of Canadian Club. "I put maybe a shot of whiskey in a liter of agar and filled the petri plates with it," Scott says. "That made it grow a hell of a lot faster."

Read the rest at the link. BTW, this article received an AAAS award. What Scott went through to ID this organism is NORMAL; all the corespondences, collecting, archive searching, shipping around for specimens, these are just average tasks for a taxonomist. Especially if you work in an obscure group.

[The Wizard Joseph]

That was pretty cool. The idea of these fungal extremophiles just squeaking by here on earth until we present them with rare environments really gets my interest.  There could be huge numbers of them with unknown properties that may or may not be beneficial to us chemically. Wild speculation because I'm no scientist, but you never know where the next big thing may come from.

[Kai]

That was pretty cool. The idea of these fungal extremophiles just squeaking by here on earth until we present them with rare environments really gets my interest.  There could be huge numbers of them with unknown properties that may or may not be beneficial to us chemically. Wild speculation because I'm no scientist, but you never know where the next big thing may come from.

One of the many reasons biodiversity is so fucking amazing.

[Kai]

BTW, I love the first quote from that article, because that attitude is the epitome of a naturalist and taxahacker. It's the sort of thing the astronomy hobbyist realizes as he points his telescope at the sky night after night, "you know, what I see could be the next great discovery". Scientist isn't a degree title, it's a mindset.

[The Wizard Joseph]

The same sense of awe used to be a theological thing for me.  "Look at all this complexity from Atoms to Zeta Reticuli... Holy Crap!"  Now that I have reasonable doubts on the subject the awe did not go away.  It got more gripping.  It's better than drugs.

[LMNO]

Hold on... a fungus that grows well in alcohol?


I'm cross-referencing this to ECH's tale of moldy gin.

[Triple Zero]

Overdue synchro-motherfucking-nicity right there.

I was really wondering how you'd manage to get mold in gin. I'm also pretty sure that an opened bottle of gin, if the cap's tight, should still be fine after 4 years in most cases.

I believe him of course, ECH wouldn't lie about throwing away gin.