The Patagonian tree fungus, Gliocladium roseum, expels hydrocarbons which could be used as fuel, scientists say. Image shows the microbe growing as a culture on a petri dish.
Credit: Gary Strobel
Another avenue of exploration is in cheap, plentiful non-food fibrous plants and cellulose materials, such as switchgrass, wood chips and straw. But these novel sources, hampered by costs and technical complications, are struggling to reach commercial scale.
"G. roseum can make myco-diesel directly from cellulose, the main compound found in plants and paper," said Strobel. "This means that if the fungus was used to make fuel a step in the production process could be skipped."
"Fungi rush"
Instead of using farmland to grow biofuels, G. roseum could be grown in factories, like baker's yeast, and its gases siphoned off to be liquefied into fuel, he suggested. Another alternative, he said, would be to strip out the enzyme-making genes from the fungus and use this to break down the cellulose to make the biodiesel.
Strobel said Montana State University had filed patents for the fungus, proceeds of which would be shared with local people in Patagonia.
Asked where the fungus had been found, he pointed to the experiences of the 1848 gold rush and said the location had to be protected: "The answer to that is, what if we pushed ourselves back about a hundred and fifty years and you heard a story about a guy finding gold out in California?"
The find is even bigger, said Strobel, than his 1993 discovery of fungus that contained the anticancer drug taxol.
Gliocladium roseum
Gliocladium roseum, today referred to genus Clonostachys by mycologists, has been described from Germany already in 1816 by the director of the Botanical Garden and Museum in Berlin, Link as a species of Penicillium. It is extremely widespread all over the world on dead plant material, paper and other substrates. The rain forest fungus producing hydrocarbons must either represent a chemically specialized population there, or the identification is wrong, or you needn't go to the rainforest, but can have it practically everywhere at home. To get it anywhere would make the whole process cheaper, though it is kept in most culture collections all over the world. It might be worthwhile to check there the properties of fungi already in culture.
PhD
To who it may concern,
I am completing my phD and am interested in this research.
Julia Yvette Krix