In North Carolina, the Soil Science Society of America reports that Duke University researchers led a study to determine how biochar affected microbes like fungi, as well as trees. Biochar can be produced from many things like corn cobs, rice husks or pine wood and is created through pyrolysis, where the material is heated in […]
It’s all about meat and mushrooms for this week’s Top 8 Innovations. From Stella McCartney’s mushroom leather bag made by Bolt Threads and new investments in NoMy to commercialize fungi-based materials all the way to Jane Goodall narrating a new documentary on cultivated meat, Ashton Kutcher’s endorsement of MeaTech to accelerate 3D printed, cultivated meat […]
In Denmark, Novozymes launched the Myco-protein Innovation Call, a global platform to cultivate new business collaborations to scale up the most promising innovations and ideas around how to use fungi as a source of protein as a way to rethink the way we manufacture and source protein globally. Novozymes has created a space where companies […]
In Finland, new VTT-based startup company eniferBio producing protein from biorefinery by-products received more than one million euros in funding. eniferBio developed a method for producing Pekilo mycoprotein – a form of single cell protein derived from fungi. Pekilo mycoprotein is nutritious and protein rich cell biomass and can be used as raw material for […]
In Austria, material chemists at the University of Vienna have evaluated the viability of vegan leather made from fungi. In a review article published in Nature Sustainability, Alexander Bismarck and Mitchell Jones discuss the use of agricultural and forestry byproducts to grow fungal mycelium into leather-like materials through physical and chemical treatments. “As a result, […]
In Germany, mushroom genetics research, conducted by Ruhr-Universität Bochum researchers and others, could help biofuel production. Some species of trichosporonales fungi can store large amounts of lipids in their cells, and are so-called oil-accumulating fungi, which have therefore been increasingly analyzed in recent years as potential producers of biofuels. Trichosporonales fungi are widespread in the […]
In Michigan, new research from Michigan State University, and published in the journal eLife, presents evidence that algae could have piggybacked on fungi to leave the water and to colonize the land, over 500 million years ago. Researchers selected a strain of soil fungus and marine alga from old lineages, respectively Mortierella elongata and Nannochloropsis […]
In Sweden, wastes become resources in the project Ways2Taste, where researchers at the University of Borås are developing methods for growing fungi on material that would otherwise have become waste. The goal is to produce climate-smart materials–including a whole new source of protein. The waste products used in Ways2Taste come from bakeries, ice cream factories, […]
In the UK, the Telegraph reports that Kew Gardens researchers and an international team from 18 countries have discovered Aspergillus tubingensis can break down plastic in weeks rather than decades using its mycelia. The fungi was found in a Pakistani trash dump by Chinese scientists last year. The discovery was part of a larger publication […]
In the UK, an international team of researchers, including scientists from the University of York, has discovered a set of enzymes found in fungi that are capable of breaking down one of the main components of wood. The enzymes could now potentially be used to sustainably convert wood biomass into valuable chemical commodities such as […]
