Great article. Fungi produced the environment we now live in. The symbiotic relationship plants have with fungi is the basis behind the idea of no-till farming. Plants are much healthier and require less input when there is a thriving fungal community in the soil. Tilling kills fungal mycelium and turns the balance to bacteria.
Besides such uses in improving traditional agriculture, I believe that the future of protein production, which is needed to supplement plant-based food, does not stay in making fake meat from animal cell cultures, like many attempt to do today, in order to sell to rich vegans.
In my opinion, with animal cell cultures it is extremely unlikely to ever be able to produce proteins at a competitive cost.
What I believe to be the right solution, because this should be able to produce high-quality proteins at lower costs than from any animal source, is to use cultures of genetically-modified fungi, which produce some high-quality proteins, e.g. whey protein or egg white protein. There already exist genetically-modified strains of the fungus Trichoderma, which produce such animal proteins, instead of the enzymes that they normally secreted into their environment. Such proteins can be separated from the fungal culture medium by ultrafiltration, in the same way how one makes from whey or milk whey protein concentrate or milk protein concentrate.
As an aside, I'm always perplexed by these statements:
> There are as many as 12 million species of fungi, yet there are just 155,000 or so known species, leaving vast numbers undescribed.
"There are as many as 12 million species of fungi, yet there are just 155,000 or so known species..."
The second number makes sense: it's how many species we've identified. But the first number... how can we know how many we don't know?
This kind of thing pops up all the time (X number of crimes go "unreported"... if they're unreported how can we say that?).
I get that they may be estimates. If so, it's pretty important that that estimation process is described.
Might as well say there are as many as 12 trillion species of fungi.
There's probably a really good answer using statistics, but it's beyond me.
Great article. Fungi produced the environment we now live in. The symbiotic relationship plants have with fungi is the basis behind the idea of no-till farming. Plants are much healthier and require less input when there is a thriving fungal community in the soil. Tilling kills fungal mycelium and turns the balance to bacteria.
Besides such uses in improving traditional agriculture, I believe that the future of protein production, which is needed to supplement plant-based food, does not stay in making fake meat from animal cell cultures, like many attempt to do today, in order to sell to rich vegans.
In my opinion, with animal cell cultures it is extremely unlikely to ever be able to produce proteins at a competitive cost.
What I believe to be the right solution, because this should be able to produce high-quality proteins at lower costs than from any animal source, is to use cultures of genetically-modified fungi, which produce some high-quality proteins, e.g. whey protein or egg white protein. There already exist genetically-modified strains of the fungus Trichoderma, which produce such animal proteins, instead of the enzymes that they normally secreted into their environment. Such proteins can be separated from the fungal culture medium by ultrafiltration, in the same way how one makes from whey or milk whey protein concentrate or milk protein concentrate.