Freaky Fungi Friday

Much more than just mushrooms, fungi—and the people who study them—are simply fascinating.

AsianScientist (Feb. 26, 2015) – Like Jordy over at Mushroom Mum, I find fungi absolutely fascinating. Sure, they’ve spoiled many a slice of bread, but fungi are the reason we even have fluffy bread in the first place, not to mention many other wonderful things like beer, blue cheese and the tempeh I just had for lunch.

Food aside, the main reason I like fungi is that they are the non-conformist freaks of the natural world. I mean, just look at these guys.


King of the freaks

But the crown for the freakiest fungi of them all might just have to go to a nondescript fella called Ophiocordyceps sinensis, better known in traditional Chinese medicine simply as cordyceps or 冬虫夏草 (winter worm summer grass). Appearing as nothing more than a brown matchstick above the ground, dig deeper and you will find that the unassuming fungi has actually sprouted out of the head of a dead caterpillar like a unicorn’s horn.

It all starts when the fungal spores attack the underground dwelling caterpillars of the Thitarodes genus of moths. Slowly but surely, the growing fungus eats its way through the hapless caterpillar from the inside out, replacing its tissue with fungal structures. After spending the harsh Tibetan winter hidden in the caterpillar’s body, the fungus bursts out of the caterpillar’s head in the summer, releasing spores that start the cycle once again. Awesome.

Unfortunately, O. sinensis is now an endangered species thanks to over-harvesting. Touted to cure everything from erectile dysfunction to ‘cancer,’ cordyceps are extraordinarily expensive, with premium grades costing more than twice their weight in gold. Health purposes aside, they’ve also become something of a status symbol and are given as pricey gifts intended to impress.

Elsewhere around the world, other cordyceps species continue to thrive in all their varied and wonderful forms.

Oddly enough, they’ve even spawned (sporulated?) a video game set in a post-apocalyptic world where humans have been turned into zombies by an unnamed cordyceps.


Fungi: the final frontier

As an immunologist, I’m interested in fungi because they are so tricky to treat. Unlike bacteria and viruses, fungi are like us in the sense that they are also eukaryotes, having their organelles bundled up in membranes. Our shared cellular machinery makes it exceptionally hard to target them, as whatever hurts them is also likely to hurt us. In comparison, many antibiotics work by targeting components of the bacterial cell wall, which don’t have close analogs in the human body.

For the same reason, it has been extraordinarily difficult to design vaccines against fungal pathogens. Scientists are still struggling trying to understand the kinds of immune responses that fungi trigger in the first place, and how to provoke a long-lasting, protective response.

Thankfully, fungi have learned to live peacefully with humans—most of the time. Candida fungi are quite happy to live in the gut and on our skin without causing any problems, but once they enter the blood stream, the results are often fatal. Like most other infectious fungi, Candida tend to be opportunistic pathogens, harming only those whose immune systems are already compromised, such as the elderly or people living with HIV.

Because they only occasionally cause problems in humans, infectious fungi are relatively understudied compared to more attention-grabbing pathogens like Ebola and Zika et al. But the fact that we know so little about them makes me all the more curious.


The female factor

Like fungi themselves, the female scientists who study them also seem to be wonderfully non-conformist, at least within my tiny sphere of experience.

Last year, I had the pleasure of interviewing Professor Gloria Lim, the first, and to date, only, female dean of the science faculty at my alma mater, the National University of Singapore. Inspiring though it was to hear how she made a mark on mycology despite not being given the opportunity to study science at the high school level, my heart broke when she told me how her invaluable fungal collection was thrown away after her retirement and how she had to struggle against the prejudice of simply being female.

Going back in time to Victorian England, we find another female fungi lover in Beatrix Potter, more famous for her beloved creation, Peter Rabbit. Keenly observing specimens under the microscope and conducting her own spore germination experiments, Potter submitted a manuscript detailing her findings to the Linnean Society of London. Unfortunately, her paper never even made it past peer review, as the influential director of the Kew Gardens at the time, William Turner Thiselton-Dyer, dismissed her work without even looking at the drawings that accompanied them.

Both Professor Lim and Potter took the sexism they faced in their stride and went on to do things that people did not expect of them. For that, and all the other reasons I’ve already described, I will always have a soft spot for fungi and the female mycologists who study them.


This article is from a monthly column called From The Editor’s Desk(top). Click here to see the other articles in this series.

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Copyright: Asian Scientist Magazine; Photo: Matthew Simantov/Flickr/CC.
Disclaimer: This article does not necessarily reflect the views of AsianScientist or its staff.

Rebecca did her PhD at the National University of Singapore where she studied how macrophages integrate multiple signals from the toll-like receptor system. She was formerly the editor-in-chief of Asian Scientist Magazine.

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