Marvelous mycelium

A fungal abode

A home-grown habitat on Mars might sound like science fiction. But Lynn Rothschild, a senior research scientist at NASA’s Ames Research Center, has worked for years to bring that fiction to reality. The key player? Fungus.

“We’ve been calling it mycotecture,” Rothschild tells Newscripts, a portmanteau of “mycology,” the study of fungi, and “architecture,” the art of designing buildings. In other words, architecture with fungi.

Rothschild envisions astronauts deploying space-hardy inflatable structures with walls filled with dehydrated wood chips and seeded with fungi. “You pack it up, you send it off-planet,” she says, “And then when you get there, you inflate it, add some water, and poof.” As the filamentous tendrils of the fungal body—the mycelium—grow, they will bind the wood into a solid building material. It’s essentially martian housing on demand.

There are several advantages to this fungal approach to living off planet. All the required materials weigh significantly less than steel, making for lighter payloads while blasting off. Mycelium walls also provide acoustic insulation and—with certain melanin-producing strains—protection against ionizing radiation. The fungi can even be functionalized with peptides to add other special properties.

At this point, the team has done everything it can on Earth to demonstrate the feasibility of mycotecture for martian or lunar living. The researchers have grown prototype structures, tested small cubes of material in planetary simulators, functionalized a fungus to bind to metals, and tested prototype inflatables. Now, the group needs to catch a ride off-planet. It might happen soon: Rothschild intends to have a competitive proposal for NASA’s next lunar payload.

Culinary treasure from food trash

Most biochemists try to keep their research away from their food. But chef-turned-biochemist Vayu Hill-Maini is building a kitchen alongside his new lab at Stanford University.

Fungi are Hill-Main’s focus. The organisms grow quickly on food waste, and “a lot of them are really delicious already,” Hill-Maini tells Newscripts. Harnessing fungi could make food systems more sustainable.

Oncom, a traditional Indonesian food, is a perfect example of the power of fungi. “It is basically a meat substitute made from the fungal fermentation of food waste,” Hill-Maini says.

Although oncom has a long and tasty history in Indonesia, its molecular composition was largely unknown. Hill-Maini, then a Miller Fellow at the University of California, Berkeley, and his colleagues used multiomics tools to characterize the fungal species and their by-products present in oncom.

They found that Neurospora intermedia dominates it. “This fungus is uniquely suited to grow on food waste and turn it into human food,” Hill-Maini says. In as little as 36 hours, N. intermedia can turn plant-based food waste into a safe and nutritious snack, thanks to enzymes that break down cellulose (Nat. Microbiol. 2024, DOI: 10.1038/s41564-024-01799-3).

It likely took hundreds of generations for humans to selectively breed N. intermedia for its desirable characteristics. In the age of genome editing, Hill-Maini sees no need to wait. Using Aspergillus oryzae—another edible fungus—as a test subject, he and his team designed a synthetic biology tool kit capable of improving the nutritional value and sensory appeal of mycelia (Nat. Commun. 2024, DOI: 10.1038/s41467-024-46314-8).

Biochemistry isn’t everything when it comes to food. “We can do all the science and engineering in the lab,” Hill-Maini says, but if people don’t think the result is tasty, “it’s a dead end.” So he worked with chefs at Michelin-starred restaurants to turn samples of N. intermedia–fermented foods into haute cuisine. The lab work paid off: the mycelia-based meals were a hit.

Please send comments and suggestions to newscripts@acs.org.