[HN Gopher] A toxin that helps oyster mushrooms devour worm flesh
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A toxin that helps oyster mushrooms devour worm flesh
Author : gumby
Score : 64 points
Date : 2023-01-18 22:33 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.nytimes.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.nytimes.com)
| [deleted]
| dp-hackernews wrote:
| If you're interested check the BBC for a documentary titled "The
| Magic of Mushrooms" - fascinating, and apparently we're
| descendants of mushrooms! :-)
| freilanzer wrote:
| > apparently we're descendants of mushrooms
|
| That sounds very difficult to believe.
| idiotsecant wrote:
| If that sounds very difficult to believe you might also be
| shocked to learn that we are descendants of single cell
| organisms as well! That's how it works.
| lioeters wrote:
| I call her Grandma LUCA: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last
| _universal_common_ancestor
| uplifter wrote:
| It's definitely not true because mushrooms are a type of
| multicellular fungi and the animal and fungal branches of
| life split off long before multicellularity arose.
| xipho wrote:
| Mushrooms are evolutionarily closer to animals than plants,
| so it's true in various ways.
|
| All life shares common elements, see the large and small
| mitochondrial subunits (rRNA). They are so critical to
| producing celluar energy that there are sequences are
| incredibly conserved, such that databases exists with
| aligments across life.
| chasil wrote:
| Plants have plastids, we do not, nor do fungi.
|
| There are several major types of plastids, and two are
| well-known: chloroplasts, and chromoplasts.
|
| Plastids emerged from symbiotic assimilation, as did the
| mitochondria.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plastid
| jjulius wrote:
| I couldn't find a written article that would encapsulate the
| referenced documentary with a cursory Google search, but the
| documentary is up in full[0] on YT if you'd like to better
| understand it.
|
| [0]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y7mdAS7KlRw
| adaptbrian wrote:
| 'Animals and fungi are each other's closest relatives:
| congruent evidence from multiple proteins'
| https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/8265589/
| di456 wrote:
| Digestion is external for mushrooms, and it evolved to be in
| animals' internal organs.
|
| The signals that mushrooms send to each other through their
| mycelium network have the same physical and chemical
| mechanisms as the brain and neurological networks.
|
| (Mushroom is a small part of the overall organism, it's just
| the fruiting body)
| TheSpiceIsLife wrote:
| Technically, the inside of the mammalian digestive system
| is _outside_ of the body.
| di456 wrote:
| Interesting, could you elaborate? Is it because the
| digestive tract is isolated from the rest of the body?
| Almost like the body was built up around it?
| TheSpiceIsLife wrote:
| In the sense that the inside of the digestive system is
| contiguous with the skin.
|
| You can trace a path from, say, the back of your knee,
| through the intestines, and out to your eye lid, as you
| can trace a path from any point on a the outside of a
| torus.
|
| We're just a very complicated doughnut.
|
| It's something a medical scientist type I studied under
| was fond of saying, and I find it a useful model
| tambourine_man wrote:
| I read a terrifying sci-fi many years ago of a genetically
| engineered fungus designed to digest our trash. It obviously
| mutates and starts digesting us. Scary stuff, never ate mushrooms
| without some suspicion after that.
| canadiantim wrote:
| FYI: Mushrooms are effectively animals who decided to digest
| things on the outside of their organism instead of the inside.
| That was the main evolutionary divergence between animals and
| fungi (who are more related to eachother than fungi are to
| plants). So we animals evolved a gastrointestinal tract running
| through the inside of our body; whereas, fungi/mushrooms
| evolved to exude digestive enzymes into the external
| environment and then reabsorb the digested products.
| gumby wrote:
| > So we animals evolved a gastrointestinal tract running
| through the inside of our body; whereas, fungi/mushrooms
| evolved to exude digestive enzymes into the external
| environment and then reabsorb the digested products.
|
| And then some animals, including humans, extended their
| "internal" digestion process to include, in some cases,
| external processing from removing husks to, yes, enzymatic
| pre-processing before consumption. I love how messy "life"
| is.
|
| I wonder how far "back" the use of symbiotic creatures in
| digestion goes. We certainly can't survive without them. I
| believe some coral and even simpler organisms have a similar
| dependency.
| jrumbut wrote:
| Isn't symbiotic metabolism a hypothesis for how cells ended
| up with mitochondria?
| gumby wrote:
| Not just mitochondria, but cilia, flagella and other
| organelles
| asveikau wrote:
| I don't consider myself knowledgeable about biology, but it
| strikes me that even this omits the nominally distinct
| fauna in our guts.
|
| I say nominally distinct because from a philosophical
| standpoint it makes a point about where "we" end and
| "other" begins. Our microbiome consists of distinct
| organisms but it is also kind of "us".
| gumby wrote:
| I was referring the microbiome of the gut. But it's true
| that process extends to extracorporal digestion, so I
| wasn't clear. I meant to be clear that I believe coral
| have symbiotic micro biomes for digestion as well, but I
| might be misremembering.
|
| > it makes a point about where "we" end and "other"
| begins.
|
| Due to illness, last year I had a major course of
| antibiotics, and after that I repopulated my gut by
| eating joghurt, not taking "probiotic" capsules. My diet
| has changed. This has made me wonder who wanted that
| doughnut: me, or some fellow traveler in my gut.
| Oxidation wrote:
| Spores would get you anyway even if you don't eat them:
| https://earthexplodes.com/comics/070/
| tambourine_man wrote:
| It was spores in the novel. Characters would notice it
| growing in their hands and feet, then it was a matter of days
| and noting that could be done. Shivery.
|
| [error 500 in the link]
| metacritic12 wrote:
| If it gives you any comfort, humans are already incredibly
| digestible by many organisms.
| tambourine_man wrote:
| Digested alive is what I meant.
| jrumbut wrote:
| So did they...
| StreamBright wrote:
| The last of us series is for you. :)
| tambourine_man wrote:
| Thanks, I'll pass :)
| QuercusMax wrote:
| Eating raw mushrooms (even the "boring" white button mushrooms)
| is often inadvisable, as they often contain toxins that
| irritate digestive systems in many people. Raw mushrooms don't
| taste like much anyway, they're much better when cooked!
| deafpolygon wrote:
| This illustrates how wonderfully inventive fungi can be in
| nature.
| jonwinstanley wrote:
| This HN headline sounds like the start of a horror movie
| haspoken wrote:
| https://archive.is/BUVcq
| LatteLazy wrote:
| I used to have quite a reductionist world view: Biology is really
| just chemistry, chemistry is really just physics, physics is
| mostly mathematics etc. But the older I get the more I appreciate
| the incredible facets of Nature.
| flobosg wrote:
| Mandatory xkcd: https://xkcd.com/435/
| kroltan wrote:
| Those points of view are not mutually exclusive, complex
| systems develop emergent behaviours, and those behaviours can
| often be even more fascinating than the rules that caused them.
| giantg2 wrote:
| Seems like the compound is found in other fungi and plants too.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/3-Octanone
| Oxidation wrote:
| > researchers report that they've identified the substance, which
| is contained in globes that they compare to lollipops.
|
| 6 paragraphs and two images later, they deign to tell you the
| identity.
|
| I really find this kind of science journalism irritating. It's
| not a murder mystery, it's a digest (ha) of some research. Just
| spit it out and don't make me wonder if I've accidentally a word.
| Then go into how they figured it out and they won't have to
| obliquely refer to it as the "toxin" or "substance".
|
| I suppose other than feeling like they're "real writers" for
| building the suspense just like that TED talk on Creative Writing
| taught them, it lengthens dwell times if they drip feed it, which
| is good for the Metrics.
|
| The answer is 3-octanone by the way. See how I could have said
| that up front and not have to find clumsy workarounds if I needed
| to refer to it again?
| LatteLazy wrote:
| Does anyone care that it's 3-octanone? Would someone read this
| article with a burning desire to know specifically which toxin
| it is?
|
| I thought it was interesting because (a) I didn't know fungi
| were (or intentionally) carnivorous and (b) it's interesting
| that something I've encountered in lavender etc is so toxic to
| these creatures.
|
| I get where you're coming from, but I thought there was plenty
| of other interesting material in the piece. It was NOT, IMHO,
| the usual "12 paragraphs of nothing then the answer at the end"
| that I think we both have come to expect?
| Symmetry wrote:
| Not as common as viral or bacterial disease, but fungal
| infections kill over a million people every year.
| red-iron-pine wrote:
| Usually only the old or immunocompromised. not a sign of
| how dangerous fungi are, but rather how weak the individual
| is.
| astrange wrote:
| One of the reasons mammals are warm-blooded is to stop
| fungi from growing inside them, so it must've been a
| problem at some point.
| sitkack wrote:
| I wonder if kids body temperature being higher than
| adults is an evolutionary adaption as well?
|
| Off to the sauna!
| Oxidation wrote:
| Well not particularly, but the title promises to tell you. In
| order to delay that, they have, to me, forsaken a lot of
| clarity of expression (they've had to come up with at least
| two circumlocutions to keep the secret) for the sake of a
| trite "payoff".
|
| Describing the toxocysts without naming them as "globes they
| compare to lollipops" is very clumsy too. Compare how?
| Favourably? And why not just use the word "toxocyst" right
| there so that when they refer to it later the reference[1] is
| explicit? Additionally, anyone who knows the words toxo- and
| -cyst will also have an immediate clear understanding of what
| it is. It's also argubly adding vagueness because it's missed
| out that it's specifically the shape, and not any other
| lollipop-like quality that's been referenced.
|
| Look at how it was written in the original paper:
|
| > In this study, we show through genetic screens that P.
| ostreatus relies on a specialized structure, toxocysts, to
| paralyze the nematode C. elegans. A volatile compound,
| 3-octanone, stored inside toxocysts...
|
| See how they don't tease it, and just get on with saying it
| and just make it clear first time round?
|
| I'd have been marked down for the writing in my English
| lessons, and I wasn't even being paid to write this stuff.
| Then again, I wasn't bring marked based on website analytics.
|
| [1] "small globes called toxocysts that hang like fruit from
| the hyphae"
| flobosg wrote:
| You could have checked the actual publication. The answer is
| right in the abstract:
| https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.ade4809
| aaron_m04 wrote:
| Sure, but why not link to that instead of the NYT article?
| flobosg wrote:
| Because the NYT article, as opposed to the paper, addresses
| a wider audience and is written in layman's terms.
| Furthermore, if you are curious about the primary source,
| the NYT piece links to it early on.
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