THE SCIENTIST - Mycelium is the fabric of fungal populations: fungi produce thread-like roots called hyphae, which branch and fuse with one another to form a vast, interconnected network—the mycelium. It allows fungi to grow rapidly, transport nutrients, and even share information about the local environment over long distances. The network is also vulnerable; a wound could lead to catastrophic bleeding of protoplasm that can lead to death. While some fungal species separate their filaments into compartments with septal walls that can limit leakage, other fungi do not make any walls, and mycologists haven’t known how they respond to an injury.
“This was a creative way to discover the proteins that might be responsible for this phenomenon,” says mycologist Jason Stajich at University of California, Riverside, who was not involved in the research. He praised the team’s ability to make observations of the fungal gelation response and “work backwards to identify the actual molecular basis of that.”