[HN Gopher] Long Overlooked as Crucial to Life, Fungi Start to G...
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Long Overlooked as Crucial to Life, Fungi Start to Get Their Due
Author : speckx
Score : 75 points
Date : 2026-03-12 13:16 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (e360.yale.edu)
(TXT) w3m dump (e360.yale.edu)
| tastyfreeze wrote:
| Great article. Fungi produced the environment we now live in. The
| symbiotic relationship plants have with fungi is the basis behind
| the idea of no-till farming. Plants are much healthier and
| require less input when there is a thriving fungal community in
| the soil. Tilling kills fungal mycelium and turns the balance to
| bacteria.
| adrian_b wrote:
| Besides such uses in improving traditional agriculture, I
| believe that the future of protein production, which is needed
| to supplement plant-based food, does not stay in making fake
| meat from animal cell cultures, like many attempt to do today,
| in order to sell to rich vegans.
|
| In my opinion, with animal cell cultures it is extremely
| unlikely to ever be able to produce proteins at a competitive
| cost. By competitive cost I mean that any such proteins should
| cost much less than chicken meat (per protein content).
|
| What I believe to be the right solution, because this should be
| able to produce high-quality proteins at lower costs than from
| any animal source, is to use cultures of genetically-modified
| fungi, which produce some high-quality proteins, e.g. whey
| protein or egg white protein. There already exist genetically-
| modified strains of the fungus Trichoderma, which produce such
| animal proteins, instead of the enzymes that they normally
| secreted into their environment. Such proteins can be separated
| from the fungal culture medium by ultrafiltration, in the same
| way how one makes from whey or milk whey protein concentrate or
| milk protein concentrate.
| spongebobstoes wrote:
| vegan options lack flavor/texture. cost isn't the main issue
| adrian_b wrote:
| Not everyone craves the flavor/texture of meat, but
| everyone needs an adequate intake of high quality protein.
|
| Including protein powder as a cooking ingredient does not
| do much for improving the taste of food (though the food
| definitely feels more satiating), but it ensures that it is
| healthy enough.
|
| Even if I liked meat, I never felt any kind of addiction to
| it. There are many years since the last time when I ate
| meat and I feel no need to eat again, as long as I have a
| lot of other options for food that is tasty and healthy.
|
| For several years I have not used any animal protein
| sources, but this forced too inconvenient constraints on
| what I could eat, so eventually I gave up and now I use in
| cooking some whey or milk protein concentrate powder,
| whenever it is necessary to increase the protein content.
| This has provided much more freedom in menu choice.
|
| So for me, if instead of having to buy protein extracted
| from whey or milk (which costs about the same as chicken
| meat, i.e. many times cheaper than protein concentrates
| extracted from plants, which must use much more complicated
| processes than the filtration of whey or milk) there would
| be the option of buying similar protein from a fungal
| culture, that would be enough to cover all my needs.
|
| From other comments that I have seen about the fake meat
| products, I am pretty sure that there are many others like
| me, who do not care whether they eat meat or not, as long
| as they eat some good food.
| jessetemp wrote:
| It doesn't need to be cheaper than the cheapest meat to be
| competitive. If there's some social or moral incentive to
| avoid real meat, that adds value to plant based alternatives.
|
| Fungi protein sounds cool though. I would totally add that to
| my diet. But I also think insects are an underutilized
| protein source, so I might be an outlier
| adrian_b wrote:
| Even when your personal budget would allow spending more
| for food, a price that is higher than that of meat is a
| serious red flag, indicating that it is likely that such a
| substitute for meat has greater environmental consequences
| than producing meat.
|
| There are 3 reasons for avoiding meat. One is the ethical
| reason, because during the last century meat production has
| transitioned everywhere to using methods that can hardly be
| considered anything else but continuous torture. There are
| also certain health risks associated with meat and there is
| also the reason that the real cost of meat may be greater
| than it appears to be, due to negative environmental
| consequences (i.e. pollution).
|
| If some kind of protein extract or some kind of fake meat
| is more expensive than real meat (per protein content), you
| can be rather certain that the negative environmental
| consequences are worse than for real meat, because the
| higher cost is likely to be determined by the consumption
| of more energy and of various kinds of chemicals during the
| production of the meat substitute.
| jessetemp wrote:
| Higher cost doesn't always indicate negative
| environmental consequences. It could be (and seems likely
| to me) that harvesting one cow's worth of plant protein
| is more labor intensive which isn't necessarily bad for
| the environment. If you compare two soy crops, one that
| uses herbicides and another that uses manual labor to
| pull weeds, the latter will be more expensive and better
| for the environment
| aziaziazi wrote:
| Economy of scale and subsidies have a major influence on
| shelf prices. Is is a red flag to be a small producer
| and/or not profiting from public money? Some wouldn't
| cold-ban a product only based on it's price, _especially_
| if it 's pioneering.
|
| Being "certain that the negative environmental
| consequences are worse" seems an stretch from weak
| initial judgement.
| pstuart wrote:
| Having it be cheaper would make it a real game changer --
| if "chicken nuggets" and "burgers" were functionally
| equivalent (nutrition, appearance, mouthfeel, etc) _and_
| cheaper, then we 'd start to see serious changes in animal
| husbandry.
|
| It will never go away but if it becomes more niche then
| it's likely that what is produced will be done so more
| humanely (branding and perception of quality)
| hinkley wrote:
| In my lifetime the conversation has shifted from mineral
| farming with chemical fertilizers to managing microbes to
| microbes doing the managing.
|
| There is a case to be made for many species of plants
| effectively being a previously unidentified manner of lichen.
| Created on mineral soil much the same way lichen grew on rocks.
| djoldman wrote:
| As an aside, I'm always perplexed by these statements:
|
| > There are as many as 12 million species of fungi, yet there are
| just 155,000 or so known species, leaving vast numbers
| undescribed.
|
| "There are as many as 12 million species of fungi, yet there are
| just 155,000 or so known species..."
|
| The second number makes sense: it's how many species we've
| identified. But the first number... how can we know how many we
| don't know?
|
| This kind of thing pops up all the time (X number of crimes go
| "unreported"... if they're unreported how can we say that?).
|
| I get that they may be estimates. If so, it's pretty important
| that that estimation process is described.
|
| Might as well say there are as many as 12 trillion species of
| fungi.
| a_t48 wrote:
| There's probably a really good answer using statistics, but
| it's beyond me.
| andrewflnr wrote:
| It's probably something like, here are the environments where
| we've done comprehensive surveys, here are the kind of
| different situations where we expect to find different species
| (decomposers of various types, mycorrhizal, within plants,
| within animals, on surfaces, specialists, generalists,
| climates, etc). Multiply the species from places where we've
| probably found most of them by the number of places where we've
| only found the most obvious fungi. However it works it's going
| to have big error bars, reflected in the fact that 12M species
| is the upper end of a range starting at 2.2M.
| sejje wrote:
| > 12 trillion species of fungi
|
| Give it enough time, it could happen
| jrflowers wrote:
| > (X number of crimes go "unreported"... if they're unreported
| how can we say that?).
|
| "Unreported" is usually short for "unreported _to police_ "
|
| I assume researchers ask people if they've seen a crime and not
| talked to the police about it.
| didgetmaster wrote:
| Also, how would they really know if a species is endangered?
| With millions of species that haven't even been identified, how
| would they know how common any of them are?
|
| There are thousands of different species of many branches of
| the taxonomy tree (insects, molds, bacteria, etc.) and like
| fungi, each have tons of species not even identified.
|
| Scientists estimate that something like 99% of species that
| ever existed, are extinct. I understand why people get upset
| when something like elephants hit the endangered list, but
| should we really care if some obscure species of dung beetle is
| endangered?
| srean wrote:
| Consider a contrived scenario where an opaque jar contains _N_
| distinguishable marbles. You take one out and note it 's type
| and put it back in. You repeat this _n_ times. If _k_ out of
| _n_ are unique it conveys information about _N_.
|
| If, for example, _k=1_ then _N_ is likely small. On the other
| hand if _k=n_ then _N_ is likely large.
|
| The most computer-sciencey way is to look at _n_ at which you
| get a repeat, ah! a hash collision.
|
| One can make these ideas more quantitative under assumptions
| about the numbers of each types of marbles.
|
| The math of hashing, birthday paradox, coupon collection and
| hyperloglog are good places to start.
|
| Then there are other ways. Two of you count the number of typos
| in a tedious text. One says N the other says n and out of them
| only k are common. From this you can estimate the likely number
| of typos in the text.
| asmodeuslucifer wrote:
| Two mushrooms walk into a bar.
|
| The bartender says "You can't come in here."
|
| They say "Oh C'mon we're fun guys!"
| rhdunn wrote:
| He looks at the religious statues in the corner and says "the
| last of your lot ended up destroying Angels!"
| rhdunn wrote:
| For those who don't get the joke --
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Destroying_angel (destroying
| angel mushroom)
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(page generated 2026-03-12 23:00 UTC)