Researchers from the Federal University of São Carlos (UFSCar) and São Paulo State University (UNESP) have isolated four fungi from the gut of the cotton bollworm caterpillar (Helicoverpa armigera) and shown, using scanning electron microscopy, that each one can alter the surface of polystyrene film. When fed expanded polystyrene, the caterpillar's gut microbiome shifted, with the yeast genus Diutina declining and potentially plastic-degrading genera including Aspergillus, Ta

Ecovative's Mycelium Chips Perform Machine Learning Tasks in DARPA-Funded Study

A landmark study published in Science has produced the first global estimate of arbuscular mycorrhizal fungal networks, finding roughly 110 quadrillion kilometres (about 68 quadrillion miles) of living fungal threads in the top 15 centimetres of Earth's soils. Researchers from SPUN, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, and more than a dozen institutions combined data from over 16,000 soil samples with robotic imaging of 300,000 individual fungal strands to build machine-learning ma