Photo: Mongkolsamrit et al., Stud. Mycol., 2020
Fungi are best known for returning dead, organic matter to the Earth, but materials scientists are exploring whether they could someday help our bodies repair. University of Utah scientists have found a hydrogel that may be a promising candidate for the job. Bio-integrated hydrogels are created from organisms that we know form crosslinked, intricate network structures that may be capable of standing in for our own soft tissues. Unlike other fungi tested that have often proved too brittle or dry out too fast, M. marquandii formed a hydrogel capable of retaining up to 83% water. It will be a long time before your doctor might offer mushroom skin as a burn treatment, or a fungi-grown hip replacement, many more experiments will be needed to see just how well this soil fungi can get along with living tissue. "To the best of our knowledge, this is the first report of a mycelium species achieving such hydrogel-like properties under submerged growth conditions, positioning M. marquandii as a novel and promising material for biomedical applications," the team writes.
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