4 ms·
If 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 ide
by krisoft 5y ago
If 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. :)
- mh- 5y agowhat a great time for novel gain of function research on obscure viruses.
- b112 5y agoDeath by genetically enhanced, unstoppable fungi which grow in the lungs, and nose. Truffled to death.
- jsiaajdsdaa 5y agoCheesed to meet you
- terom 5y agoBut your infected lungs will be very simple and cheap to analyze, because they will glow in the dark.
- islon 5y agoIsn't this the plot of The Last of Us?
- b112 5y agoActually, in the brain, yeah. And a well thought out plot, too. I remember looking at old newspapers in the game, and it looks like the fungus was on crops. And I think there were allusions that the fungus was the same on which controls ants, but mutated. Very fun game.
- scythe 5y agoI was thinking more of a "point an ultrasonic imager at the dirt" kind of solution. There's got to be some way to see what's going on before nine years!
- r00fus 5y ago> 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. This should be a top priority or you're describing the beginning of the next disaster/distopian movie.
- spywaregorilla 5y agobioilluminescent truffles sounds like a really good idea to me
- heavyset_go 5y agoFrom what I understand, a complex symbiosis is required for truffle mycelia to flourish, so the immune system idea might backfire by killing beneficial organisms similar to how antibiotics can kill beneficial bacteria in the human body.
- folli 5y agoEven worse idea, but much more realistic: -add a fungicide resistance gene into your truffle strain. Inoculate your tree with this GMO strain, treat the soil regularly with appropriate fungicide. This will kill off the competing fungi, leaving only your strain.
- vintermann 5y agoI have a hunch that wouldn't work well. Trees often use more than one type of mycorrhizal fungi, and there's a lot we don't know about why, how, what causes the mycelium to start the production of fruiting bodies etc.
- labawi 5y agoNot to worry, they will simply use a low dose, enough to slow down the competing fungi, breeding fungicide resistance in the process.
- Someone 5y agoEven then, figuring out what’s needed to make it grow _and_produce_truffles_ may be challenging. There are lots of variables. Temperature/humidity/acidity of the ground/availability of nutrients/… throughout the year all may matter. Possibly, that’s even throughout the yearS. Mast happens “at irregular periods of 2–12 years” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mast_(botany) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mast_(botany)) and we don’t really understand that, either.