You Didn’t Know Mushrooms Could Do All This | National Geographic

so many things you can do with fungi and this is what keeps us up at night punch out for food medicine textiles fiber packaging materials even biofuel fungi just have this potential to unlock biological material that's a waste product in our civilization and convert it into something else so that's what's exciting and everyone's like scampering on to this bandwagon to try to catch up I started as a grower and I was out collecting edible mushrooms that would be all I was interested in the edibility the economic factor you know I can sell this mushroom to make money this one's definitely sellable it smells really good it's just untie me completely that's affection all in the meantime I'm focused on this one mushroom in the woods while there I'm passing thousands and I've got my blinders on now all I'm interested in is is all those little brackets and fungi I have a lot of species of fungi here in the lab and there's one and a half million species plus a fun giant on the planet to concentrate to somehow do we need to chemists or it kind of our theory is that when you have an infection and you're either not sure what the bacteria is or you know that that bacteria is drug-resistant so we don't have a really perfect treatment that you could take that bacterial inoculate the mushroom so put it on the mushroom the mushroom would then sweat out these metabolites and those metabolites would basically be able to kill that bacteria so it's like a personalized antibiotic production system for your infection knowing the problems we have with antimicrobial resistance something like this that's coming out of a different perspective and saying looks let's take advantage of what the natural world can already do to meet that's just fascinating I think it's unlimited what we could do with mushrooms once we know more about the different varieties that are out there and more about their biology in general right now Haiti has been completely deforested and so part of the process of developing requires building materials there is a urgency to go out and find new sustainable products and I think this has a really big potential to be one of those we're looking at compression strength tensile strength lamely hardens its ability to act as insulation the fungi has so many properties that are healing properties antibiotic properties lightweight it's a great source of protein it will be able to filter all sorts of pathogens and chemicals out of our water system the amount of potential solutions that we have for fungi are tremendous good girl it's her favorite you open one door there's ten doors then you open up that one and it's a hundred and all these have not been explored yet this is just the beginning we're not sure why the fungi bioluminesce and that's what we're trying to do right now let's figure out why

Channel: National Geographic

Views: 638,909

Rating: 4.9397922 out of 5

Keywords: national geographic, nat geo, natgeo, animals, wildlife, science, explore, discover, survival, nature, documentary, Fungi, microbiology, engineering, pharmacy, food, insulation, healing, antibiotic, protein, bacteria, medicine, research, designers, textiles, mushrooms, mycology, Mushroom Mountain, Tradd Cotter, National Geographic, Nat Geo, NatGeo, YouTube

Id: BlcKBKJ8uro

Length: 3min 30sec (210 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 13 2016