Isn’t there some conspiracy theory about how mushrooms secretly rule the world?
No. Stop asking questions.
There’s a fun movie: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt11881160/
What?
A movie about fungi. I can’t say more without spoilers.
Immortal mushrooms? Like some quill does? Googling it is spammed by “mushroom of immortality” because of some chinese legend. But may be the same thing.
So most fungi do have a lifespan, they have teleomere decay, and when you’re cloning mushrooms (from propagating mycelia) you have to let them go to fruit (the part that looks like a mushroom) every now and then. It’s a pain in the ass.
But like the other poster said, they play it fast and loose with which part you consider the “organism”. My favorite thing is that they do cytosolic streaming. Genetics can be a pain on mushrooms because not only do they share nutrients and metabolic burden through mycelia, they can share nuclei.
One of the weird convienent realities we used extensively is that cells are big enough you can spread them over a petri dish with a little loop, and if you diluted the initial sample enough, the colonies that developed were, practically speaking, from one parent cell. So you could try to modify a bunch, and then plate them (spreading the cells around) and pick individual colonies that were all clones from a single parent. Fungi mycelia means the nucleus isn’t stuck in one cell. It also means expression levels can be variable (some cells will have multiple nuclei, and then later maybe they don’t).
Fungi are a godamn pain in the ass to study. They’re not mysterious, they’re not alien, they’re just fucking assholes.
Being a mycologist sounds a lot like being a mechanic who works on German cars
Is there really a mushroom that will make your body irritated because it’s so similar?
one passage I read warned that anyone who got too deep into studying mushrooms very quickly started to sound like they had gone off the deep end …
Just give me the mushrooms that’ll make me see the curvature of the universe fam
My mushrooms are too strong for you, traveller
I always liked the theory that fungi are actually aliens that came from some asteroid from another planet and have just been around long enough that nobody bats an eye at them anymore. I mean, look at slime mold and tell me that not basically Venom!
Slime mold is a protist not fungi :0. I’m just being a jerk here doesn’t matter lol. I love the slime molds they’re so cool I always liked having them in the lab each year as a teaching tool. Definitely venom
