What Is She Doing!! ~~~~ Why!!!

Common puffball / Flaschen-Staubling fungi Rhineland-Palatinate, Germany

FOTD #114 : purple brittlegill! (russula atropurpurea)

the purple brittlegill (also blackish-purple russula) is a mycorrhizal fungus in the family russulaceae. it grows with both coniferous & deciduous trees !! it has been recorded in europe, asia & eastern north america. :-)

the big question : can i bite it?? yes, though it's not particularly recommended. it is said to taste.. hot?

r. atropurpurea description :

"the cap is 4–10 cm (1.5–4 in) in diameter. it is dark reddish purple, with a dark; sometimes almost black centre. at first it is convex, but later flattens, & often has a shallow depression. it can also be lighter in colour, or mottled yellowish. the stem is firm, white, & turns grey with age. it measures 3–6 cm in length & 1–2 cm in diameter. the closely set and fairly broad gills are adnexed to almost free, & pale cream, giving a spore print of the same colour."

[images : source & source] [fungus description : source]

I sometimes think about bacteria growing on (in?) an agar plate and how strange it must be from their perspective. To be taken from your (many times hostile) natural habitat and placed in (on?) an alien landscape made entirely of food that caters perfectly to your dietary needs. You live there, and your descendants thrive there for generations after, and then comes a Cataclysm. And they die in an inferno of steam and pressure, suddenly and unexpectedly.

And you never knew you were the fortunate ones. Your brethren lived their lives in other equally alien worlds, except theirs were tailored to kill them, torture them, or starve them of necessary nutrients. Their torment and your bliss serve a purpose ufathomable to you, a purpose of creatures so vast and unknowable, they might as well be Gods.

I think about bacteria sometimes.

CRISPR was already on thin fucking ice as a serious name for a biotech technique and now they made up CRISPY-BRED are you joking

FOTD #073 : apricot jelly! (guepinia helvelloides)

apricot jelly (AKA salmon salad & red jelly fungus) is a saprobic jelly fungus in the family exidiaceae. it often grows in small tufts in the soil :-) it is found in canada, the US, mexico, iran, turkey, brazil, puerto rico, china & most parts of europe.

the big question : can i bite it?? yes !! it is edible but bland.

g. helvelloides description :

"the fungus produces salmon-pink, ear-shaped, gelatinous fruit bodies that grow solitarily or in small tufted groups on soil, usually associated with buried rotting wood. the fruit bodies are 4–10 cm (1.6–3.9 in) tall & up to 17 cm (6.7 in) wide; the stalks are not well-differentiated from the cap."

[images : source & source] [fungus description : source]

🪐

Cribraria cancellata by Sarah Lloyd

Bacterial Morphology Chart. Poster of full color micrographs depicting basic bacterial shapes and arrangements. x

ChemistryViews

Silkworms Produce Spider Silk for the First Time - ChemistryViews

Spider silk by silkworms offers a green alternative to synthetic fibers

With the fast fashion industry… how it is… finding sustainable ways to make fabric is super important.  Fibers from synthetic fabrics make up 35% of the microplastics that make their way to the ocean.  Natural fibers sourced from plants or animals are much more environmentally sound options, including silk.

Currently, the only way to get natural silk on a large scale is to harvest it from silkworms.  You’ve probably heard about the strength and durability of spider silk (it is 6x stronger than Kevlar!) but as of yet there hasn’t been a good way of getting it.  Raising spiders the way people do silkworms isn’t really an option.  Spiders need a lot of room to build their webs compared to silkworms, and individual spiders don’t produce that much silk.  Plus, when you put a whole bunch of spiders in captivity together, they tend to start eating each other.

Attempts to artificially recreate spider silk have also been less than successful.  Spider silk has a surface layer of glycoproteins and lipids on it that works as a sort of anti-aging “skin”- allowing the silk to withstand conditions such as sunlight and humidity.  But this layer has been very tricky to reproduce.

However, as scientists in China realized, silkworms produce that same kind of layer on their silk.  So what if we just genetically modified silkworms to produce spider silk?

That is exactly what the researchers at Donghua University in Shanghai did.  A team of researchers introduced spider silk protein genes to silkworms using CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing and microinjections in silkworm eggs.  In addition to this, they altered the spider silk proteins so that they would interact properly with the other proteins in silkworm glands.  And it worked!  This is the first study ever to produce full length spider silk proteins from silkworms.

The applications of this are incredibly exciting.  In addition to producing comfortable textiles and new, innovative bulletproof vests, silkworm generated spider silk could be used in cutting edge smart materials or even just to create better performing sutures.  In the future, this team intends to research how to modify this new spider silk to be even stronger, and they are confident that “large-scale commercialization is on the horizon."

These pictures show PAS (purple/pink) and GMS (brown/blue) staining of a lymph node biopsy from a canine patient with lymphadenopathy and weight loss. Histology was suggestive of likely a fungal organism (bright pink in the PAS stain and dark brown/black in the GMS stain), however a mixed infection with an algal species could not be definitively ruled out without microbiology.

Our microbiologist cultured an Aspergillus species from this dog, and is in the process of ruling out any other possibilities.

What's especially cool is in one of the PAS pictures, you can see an organism trapped within an actively dividing macrophage!