TIL: Radiation Eating Fungus found at Chernobyl
I've always been amazed that "Life Always Seems to Find a Way" to fill any sort of niche such as around the deep water thermal vents, to albino species in deep caves and now to massively irradiated areas. This news story discusses the discovery of Radiotrophic fungus found within Chernobyl that actually "Eat Radiation" as a means of acquiring energy.
Much like plants developed the green chlorophyll to capture sunlight and turn it into needed "food," this radiation eating fungus (Cryptococcus neoformans), colored near black, has been found to use Melanin (the same that effects our skin pigmentation) to capture gamma radiation upon impact and convert it into usable energy. It is worth noting here that the fungi do NOT actually ingest the radioactive material itself, but rather capture the gamma wave radiation that is emitted.
Continued Research and Applications
Research has continues on these fungi to see if they could be used to remove toxic waste. One of the more interesting things I read in this article was:
They all shared one very interesting characteristic—they all contained the skin pigment melanin.
Perhaps the most interesting was a common species of black mold, Cryptococcus neoformans. This fungus does not normally contain melanin, but when exposed to radiation levels 500 times higher than background radiation, it would start producing melanin within 20 to 40 minutes.
Cryptococcus and other species grow faster in high radiation environments then their counterparts do at normal amounts of radiation. Casadevall’s work led to the discovery that the fungi use melanin to capture energy given off by ionizing radiation, rather like plants use chlorophyll to capture sunlight.
-Source
A couple of articles on this can be read at the epochtimes.com,on nature.com and here at sciencedaily.com.
Image Sources:
Cryptococcus neoformans
Enjoyed the post. Thanks for the read.
Absolutely! It's definitely not something we hear about everyday. There have also been reports of this fungus being found in Fukushima, Japan as well.
They've even started to send some of these spores into space for additional research hoping to find ways to help depression and/or cancer.
Wow. Go nature!!!!! That is simply amazing. As long as they don't grow up to be this...
Pappa... have you been in Russia?
hahaha the chilli bombs from PvZ!
Rofl! I'm with you there. We don't want another Attack of the Killer Tomatoes!
Source
I will say I've somewhat followed the animals that are still living and mutating around Chernobyl over the years.
I remember reading this the other day and I said to myself, "Life really can develop anywhere and can survive on anything". Makes you wonder how many different life forms are out there in the universe, doesn't it?
I am dubious whether high levels of radiation are survivable but lower levels, and with water around, clearly it can be. Paul stamets wrote about how there is many fungi that help sequester and neutralise radionucleides. I am sure there is organisms that can clean up anything. There must be, because otherwise the planet would still be dirty on the outside. Biochemistry research has found many useful products can be made from toxic materials using bacteria and fungi.
Oh I totally agree. While we may not have what we normally think of in the sense of life forms in more extreme places (such as trees and insects above certain altitudes, fish in deep water, etc.) the more microscopic life forms always seem to find some way to adapt and make use of these environments (there being a huge plus of little competition to deal with.)
I've even read of bacteria that are able to survive the rigors of outer space such as extremely low pressures, temperatures and high radiation. Life in general is quite amazing and resilient where it almost always seems to find some way to adapt to sustain itself even in the most bizarre ways. I'll be shocked if we don't start seeing more research into these types of extremophiles as time goes on, probably seeing it move into more advanced gene splicing experiments (which I'm still open to seeing and a good and/or bad thing.)
Yeah, you must have heard of Tardigrades. They can survive in space and can even survive radiation. They are like the toughest organisms there are! Nature's perfection manifested.
They've definitely crossed my path, admittedly it's been a while since specifically looking back at them. I will say that if more things looked that cute under the microscope we would probably get more public attention in these areas! Lol. I hadn't come across this video on them before, felt it was worth sharing.
Hope! Nice find!
TY! I found this one very intriguing.
Interesting, I didn't know of this fungus! Time to go learn some more!
So far what I've read on it has been fascinating, especially that they use Melanin to capture and convert the radiation. I'll probably include some of these ideas into my space mining fiction story, lol. It'd be handy to be able to gain energy when working in space as well as it's methods of preventing itself from mutating in a damaging way. From what I'd seen, this species has multiple strands of the same DNA chains so if one is 'changed' it still has previous, stable copies to work from preventing many of the common exposure to radiation issues.
Having more than one genome would allow for effective use of homologous recombination to correct the damage, so long as there was some way to differentiate the undamaged chain from the damaged chain.
I remember it having some method to tell the 'old/control' vs 'new/mutated' chain, but I've not been able to track down exactly where I had read that right now. I'll add it in here should I be able to track it down.
Cool, its certainly not a fungus that you want to be exposed to, as if you breathe it in, it is can cause fatal meningitis even in non immune compromised individuals. It lives dormant in the lungs until immune system weakness, then travels to and infects the brain and meninges. Not a good fungus!
Doh! This was finally going to be my chance to become a Super Hero!! Lol, jkjk
Definitely a good thing to have noted on here.
Amazing nature! :)
Very interesting article, sykychica! Nature is ... is, well, 'amazing' falls short. I'm not sure if ANY word would truly describe how awesome mother nature is - when humans stay out of her way.
TY! And so true! Nature always finds some way to blow our minds!
Unfortunately, I suspect Mother Nature does have ways to 'put us back in check' when we don't stay out of her way.
I really hope to see us truly 'try' to get back into a little bit better balance versus the frequent view of 'it was all made for the human race to whatever they want with.'
The adaptable FUN-GUY!
Really is amazing how nature knows how to deal with things in such amazing ways sometimes!
HAHA! Fun-guy! :D
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