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The article says that we're still not sure how the fruit reproduces. With all this money on the line, how is it that nobody has figured this out?
by jdhn 5y ago
The article says that we're still not sure how the fruit reproduces. With all this money on the line, how is it that nobody has figured this out?
- fhe 5y agoit's actually not that much money -- a few hundred million dollars for world wide market? also it seems a fairly inelastic market, i.e. if price drops to 1/5 it's current price, demand won't go up any where near 5x, so current suppliers have little incentive to increase supply or lower cost.
- jdavis703 5y agoUnless it’s patentable, there’s no economic incentive for any one farmer or farm conglomerate to invest in this research. It would require government or non-profit research. And in a world of scarce resources, funding research on a luxury food item would strike many as a waste of taxes or philanthropic funds. (I’m not saying it’s wasteful, learning the secrets of truffle reproduction could unlock a new branch of scientific study. Just explaining why this is.)
- Cerium 5y agoThere is incentive to discover but not to share.
- MattGaiser 5y agoJust make it a trade secret? A patent is basically making it public in exchange for a guaranteed, albeit short term, exclusive right. Why not just let only a few know and keep it secret from everyone else?
- lumost 5y agoPeople talk, if it’s not patentable it would be pretty hard to prove that one of the salaried researchers new truffle farm business is a trade secret.
- 1123581321 5y agoThat would be an easy criminal case. Trade secrets arguably are better protected by the law than patents for certain types of knowledge.
- ksdale 5y agoLots of businesses have successfully kept trade secrets for decades, many very famous and gigantic company's recipes are trade secrets. Companies know that if they patent it, it will be in the public domain eventually, whereas trade secrets can stay secret indefinitely, theoretically.
- anamax 5y agoGoreTex and Coke are still secrets.
- lumost 5y agoThe vast number of off brand cola and waterproof fabric products would seem to imply that marketing is the operative force rather than the secret recipe.
- quickthrower2 5y agoKnock off Coke that tastes just as good would surely hit at it’s dominance - you’d end up with a levelled playing field more like wine is.
- 5y ago
- freeopinion 5y agoThat's the current situation. When they say, "nobody knows" it means that nobody who does know is talking.
- cortesoft 5y agoWell, if it was a trade secret then we still wouldn't know... so maybe it is?
- HWR_14 5y agoIf there was a reliable trade secret, then there would probably be farmers producing outsized yields. Hiding the total production per acre would be difficult in such a top end product where consumers frequently tour the farm.
- dghlsakjg 5y agoEdible foraged mushroom markets are surprisingly opaque. The foragers are unlikely to give anything more than a vague notion of where they find their stuff in my experience. It wouldn’t surprise me at all to learn that there are people that have figured out how to increase yields in the wild or simulate correct growing conditions
- pkaye 5y agoSonoma county is right next to US Davis which is big on agriculture research.
- ProjectArcturis 5y agoWhoever invents a pill that makes your penis bigger will be a trillionaire. How is it that nobody has figured that out?
- tubby12345 5y agothis is like some kind of reverse occam's razor argument but i feel like your point is blunted by the fact that there are lots of companies making tons of money off of viagra derivatives.
- voltagedivider 5y agoViagra doesn't make your penis bigger; it temporarily alleviates erectile dysfunction.
- tubby12345 5y agoI know how Viagra works. Do you know what the word blunted means?
- voltagedivider 5y ago> Do you know what the word blunted means? I know of blunt statements and blunt/blunted knife blades but maybe I misunderstood your usage of the word. Care to explain?
- MattGaiser 5y agoTruffles do reproduce. So it is not a question of if it is possible, but merely how an observable phenomenon occurs. There are no penis enlargement pills yet beyond viagra and one of the problems is that there is no proof that anything drug can extend tissue in that way.
- version_five 5y ago"I've ordered products like this before, wasted a pretty penny I don't mind telling you. But if this works, I'll order a dozen. We're not selling penis mightiers Well you're sitting on a goldmine Trebek" It's not clear to me this is true. I think there may be some niche market, but I think most men wouldn't even consider something like this. A few people mentioned viagra, which has made a lot of money, but that's not about size. I remember reading a long time ago that there is some kind of "enlargement" surgery available, but that the motivation is almost exclusively the "locker room" rather than a sexual issue. Anyway, I'm sure that an invention as you describe may be interesting to some niche, but I don't believe it's one of the worlds burning problems, which is why it hasn't had any serious study.
- umvi 5y agoMushrooms can be super fickle - the conditions under which a spore will grow depend on soil composition, acidity, temperature, and other things. Morels are also famously hard to farm. Most people just hunt for them after forest fires.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- cwkoss 5y agoIt's probably very hard to measure truffle mycelium growth: its fragile and buried under very heterogenous dirt. And mycelium is the form this organism takes the majority of the time: the fruit is just the end product. It'd be like trying to understand how plants grow without being able to see or measure light.
- cwkoss 5y agoFun fact: up to 30% of soil carbon is glomalin - it's a fungal byproduct which is very important to soil health. We only discovered these proteins in 1996. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glomalin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glomalin
- tsimionescu 5y agoAccording to that article, we know this protein exists, but we have never actually been able to isolate and study it directly - we just see some derived substances. Fascinating how such basic things are still somewhat mysterious; and how it's easier to create antibodies to detect byproducts of a protein than it is to chemically isolate that protein!
- entangledqubit 5y agoWhile not the same as the full mechanism for reproduction. The cultivation section of the relevant Wikipedia article claims that there was significant large scale cultivation of the truffle in France at the end of the 19th century -- and that many of the techniques were later lost.
- phkahler 5y ago>> The article says that we're still not sure how the fruit reproduces. And when they got one, they ate it. I would have thought maybe breaking it up and I dunno, planting it or spreading it around might be a good idea.
- Bud 5y agoIt'd be nice if it worked that way, but it doesn't...otherwise they'd have just started it that way from the beginning.
- pvaldes 5y agoThat would be antieconomic. Culturing a truffe means buying a tree that cames "pre-configured" in a lab and letting it grow. This young sapling would cost, lets say, 80$. Thus they would be burying 1000$ for a lottery ticket with a small chance of turning it into a new 80$ tree. Very bad idea. Anybody can buy a pre-seeded tree online. Eating the truffe instead is advertisement and creating a net of future exigent customers. For chefs is also an opportunity to verify that you have exactly the right stuff. There are other types of truffe that grow in Corylus and have a much lower market value.
- krisoft 5y agoWe do know how truffles reproduce. It's on wikipedia [1] "Because truffle fungi produce their sexual fruiting bodies under ground, spores cannot be spread by wind and water. Therefore, nearly all truffles depend on mycophagous animal vectors for spore dispersal." The truffle is full of spores. Because it is underground it can only spread far if something or someone digs it up and tries to eat it. "When the ascospores are fully developed, the truffle begin to exude volatile compounds that serve to attract animal vectors." The truffle smells good so something or someone finds it and digs it up. The trick is that humans only care about a few species of mushrooms as truffles. You spread the spores of one of these good species around the roots of a tree sapling you plant and then you hope that it will establish a good healthy colony. If for any reason some other mushroom species outcompetes your truffle species you won't have any truffles. And it takes multiple years to know if that happened or not. So any experimentation in finding the right method or the right conditions to promote the truffle species and discourage the other species goes at a snail's pace. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truffle#Ecology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truffle#Ecology
- s1artibartfast 5y agoThere are degrees to how, and much is still unknown. As you point out, much of the unknown how relates to propagation and symbiotic bonding to the host trees and soil biology.
- krisoft 5y agoYou are very right. I choose to pursue other mysteries in my time here on Earth, but it would be so exciting getting to know everything there is to know about the mycorrhiza. Even just reading the literature to learn what others already know would take a long time. Sometimes I feel life is too short. Ps: Excelent work on the fjords, they turned out really pretty.
- krisoft 5y agoIf someone would want to invest a crazy amount of money to accelerate this discovery process I can imagine two things we could do: (don’t do it, it is a bad idea) - we could make a genetically modified truffle fungi which glows in the dark. Now, why would that help? The problem with monitoring the health of your fungi is that most of the body mass of it is in the form of tiny thread like stuff called mycelium. Even if you take a soil sample it is kinda hard to tell the mycelium of the right species apart from the wrong ones. With some species experts can tell them apart under microscope but the only sure way to tell what fungi’s mycelium you are looking at is to DNA sequence it. Which is expensive thus rarelly done. But if you could make your target specie glow under UV light it would make the analysis that much simpler and cheaper. So we could do it more often and thus learn about what factors favour our truffle faster. - The other option would be to engineer a kind of “immune system” to our truffle species. Basically to make “nanobots” which leave our truffle but kill other fungi. Now how on earth would one do something like that? I would start by trying to modify mycoviruses (the kind of viruses which attack fungi). Many of them are already quite picky about what kind of fungi they infect, so probably that would help us. Bonus points if we can engineer the virus such that it dies out in nature after a few rounds of reproduction so we can minimize the chances of an escape. Of course both of these ideas are very speculative, scifi level conceptual stuff. :)
- johnba1 5y agoThey break it down per ounce. I was fed "truffle butter" but it turned out to be the opposite of my expectations.There was a whole bunch of cannabis in there, and I was pissed. Not good
- seattle_spring 5y agoI'm sorry but I laughed out loud at your comment. How did you find yourself in that situation? Who presented the butter to you?
- bobthepanda 5y agoFood is devilishly complicated. Vanilla was not successfully pollinated by humans until 1841, which meant that it did not grow outside of the natural range of its pollinator in Mexico (and only a very small region of Mexico.) And today most vanilla does not come from vanilla beans but is synthesized from petrochemicals, because vanilla's pollination is still ridiculously expensive. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/bittersweet-story-vanilla-180962757/ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/bittersweet-st...