Mushrooms are our allies against toxic substances produced by petrochemicals. They can help degrade pollution that man has invented without being able to get rid of it. Explanations and demonstration with an extract from “Special Envoy” in a Marseille laboratory which houses an incredible “mycotheque”.
What if the innovations of tomorrow were hiding at our feet? Saprophytes are mushrooms and micro-organisms that feed on dead organic matter.
It is in Marseille, in the laboratory of the National Research Institute for Agriculture, Food and the Environment (Inrae), that researchers from all over the world come to obtain supplies. A one-of-a-kind mycotheque cultivates in vitro the strains of these natural cleaners. “Special Envoy” met David Navarro, an engineer in fungal biotechnology. With his team, he studies the enzymes of these fungi which allow them to “digest” and degrade matter.
Clean up wood treated with hydrocarbons
Future applications are many. For example, what to do with old railway sleepers and used telecommunication poles, knowing that their wood (respectively oak and pine) has been treated with creosote, a mixture of hydrocarbons, against fungi and insects ? These woods at the end of their life represent a problem for the environment: toxic, “they cannot be recycled like other wood, nor even incinerated in conventional incinerators”, explains David Navarro.
In France, 600,000 sleepers are replaced each year. Impregnated with this carcinogenic substance, they are classified as “hazardous waste”. The properties of saprophytes could be used to degrade their pollution to make this wood recyclable.
Degrade very resistant dyes
Another pollution created by man without having planned a way to get rid of it, that of textile pigments such as those used to dye jeans: “molecules very difficult to degrade, which will pollute the rivers next to the factories”. The researcher shows buckets colored by their contents. In the center, a lighter area: this is the work of the fungus. As it grows, it degrades the pigment inside.
Because the mushroom “can transform all kinds of organic matter present on Earth… and the chemistry that man has created, the fungus will also be able to degrade it”. The promising capacities of mushrooms could therefore make them one of the weapons of the future against pollution caused by petrochemicals.
Extract from “Champions mushrooms!”, a report to see in “Special Envoy” on June 22, 2023.
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