The Fungi Chronicles: 9th Most Bizarre Biofuels Story of the Year

In this story from January, “Turn and Face the Strange,” we looked at WWII canvas rotting fungi as a biomass conversion technology, a fungus that produces diesel, a fungus that synthesizes ethanol, one that produces cellulase, and a symbiotic garden of fungi managed by leafcutter ants to assist in their leaf-converting activities.

But the topper was the news that up to 90 percent of Missouri’s  Conservation Reserve Program land, where fescue is running rampant, may be infected with ergot (a fungus from which LSD is synthesized).

“A heft amount of carbon is sequestered by endophyte-infected fescue, so it has some carbon benefit. But that is courtesy of its ability to powerfully eradicate microbial life in its growing path and, by creating a nanoscopic, underground Chernobyl, storing carbon that otherwise would be munched and released by those pesky organisms known as life forms.”