Tune into your favorite TV or YouTube chef, or browse leading restaurant menus, and it’s highly likely you’ll see mushrooms there. But these favored fungi aren’t your standard white buttons. These are specialty mushrooms, also known as exotics, with shapes, colors, tastes and textures that spur culinary minds and palates to new heights.
For many years, the only fresh mushrooms found on market shelves were common mushrooms: white buttons, cremini and portabellas — all versions of Agaricus bisporus. (Ask a mushroom grower the difference between cremini and portabella, and their answer is “about three days.”)
But advances in controlled environment agriculture (CEA) have changed everything. Specialty mushrooms, defined by the U.S. Department of Agriculture as everything outside the Agaricus genus, have gone from seasonal outdoor crops with limited production windows to economically viable, year-round indoor pursuits.
Thanks to the foodie and wellness movements, American demand for safe, sanitary, CEA-produced specialty mushrooms, such as shiitakes, oysters, maitakes, enoki and lion’s mane, has grown. As consumers become more informed on proven mushroom health benefits, demand is expected to build even more.
For growers interested in specialty mushrooms, Law points to European mushroom consumption, roughly double U.S. rates, and Asian mushroom consumption, more than five times U.S. rates. He also notes that China’s mushroom production has grown from 30 to 40% of the global mushroom market 30 years ago to 80% today. “That tells me the potential for the rest of the world is huge,” Law says. “We need 10 times the mushroom growers.”
Mushroom Coffee To Beat Stress And Fight Diseases, Here's Everything You Need To Know About The Latest Food Trend
If you have spent more than ten minutes browsing through your Insta feed, you must have noticed that mushrooms are having a moment - not in a fancy dish but coffee. Coffee drinkers have been touting it as a health drink because of its disease-fighting properties. Mushrooms have long been used in Chinese medicine and newer research shows they are the highest dietary source of the antioxidants ergothioneine and glutathione, which help protect the body against free-radical damage.
Now, when you think of mushroom coffee, you may think of these little veggies floating around in a hot cup of joe, but that's not what this is. Mushroom coffee is simply regular coffee blended with medicinal mushroom extracts. The extract is prepared by spray-drying key components of the mushrooms to produce a concentrated extract. In the extraction process, both the water-soluble and the fat-soluble active compounds from the mushrooms are removed. while portobello coffee isn't a thing, varieties like chaga, cordyceps, and reishi mushrooms are used most commonly in brews. So it is a finely ground blend that's packaged into little pouches you mix with hot water. It's instant coffee with some (nearly tasteless) mood-enhancing adaptogens that pack an extra punch.
‘It’s like night and day’: Chanterelle buyer impressed by 2019 crop
Mushroom season is in full swing as chanterelles are experiencing a healthy bloom.
That’s according to Keewatin Community Development Association CEO Randy Johns, who said chanterelles are big and plentiful this year due to the cold, damp weather this summer. He noted people were starting to find mushrooms by the second week in July, adding most pickers generally start the week before SaskatchewanDay in August.
“It’s like night and day,” Johns said. “Last year was a short season without very many mushrooms, so it started off OK maybe in the third week in July and then it just stopped. Within a couple weeks it was done.”
While his quota is smaller than other buyers in the region, Johns stated he stopped accepting chanterelles on Tuesday after hitting his goal of 750 pounds. On that day alone, 400 pounds of mushrooms came through the door at Boreal Heartland Forest Products where they are marketed and distributed to stores throughout the province. Johns mentioned, however, the season for chanterelles could be quite long this year and they could still be around in September.
Fungi Should Make a Greater Contribution to Humanity
Fungi are one of the five pillars of biodiversity in the ecosystem and occupy a wide range of ecological niches.
Fungi, plants, insects, animals, microorganisms, and even other fungi compete with and are also mutually dependent upon one another. Over their long-term evolution, mutual interactions and reciprocal changes have allowed them to develop a wide array of survival mechanisms.
These unique characteristics make fungi have great promise in biotechnology and industrial exploitation.
Fungi are ubiquitous - air, water, soil, forests, plants, and animals are internally and externally replete with fungi. They are difficult to spot by the naked eye and are only perceptible once they grow fruiting bodies or mushrooms.
The latest estimates of the earth's total fungi include roughly 220 to 380 million species, of which less than 10% have been described and identified by humans. Fungi are an essential part of the ecosystem.
Fungi play an important role in the degradation of trees and other litter, providing plants with nutrients and food for invertebrates. Many large-scale fungi are eaten by humans, and mushrooms are rich in nutrients.
XU Jianchu's research team from Kunming Institute of Botany of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (KIB/CAS) has been engaged in fungal taxonomy and fungal ecology research since 2010.
Thus far, the team has discovered over 20 new genera and nearly 1000 new species. The above findings have been published in 12 relevant research papers by the first and corresponding authors in important journals such as Fungal Diversity and Study in Mycology.
Moreover, the results from the further discovery of the plastic-eating Aspergillus tubingensis were published in Environmental Pollution in 2017, which became a hot topic in global research that year and was extensively reported on by the media.
Fungi can be grown with relative ease, making them suitable for large-scale production. Research into fungal biodiversity and the creation of a living fungi collection have enormous economic potential for the development of new products and new applications.
Fungi provide drugs that are important for human health, like penicillin and lovastatin, but there are still more resources awaiting development.
Fungi provide hope for environmental pollution through the biodegradation of plastics as well as for ecological restoration through mycorrhizal technologies. They are an indispensable part of the green and circular economies. Research into fungal diversity and its industrial exploitation have already become hotspots in the field of fungal research.
For these reasons, after a nearly two-year review of the literature, the gathering and collating of data, and a systematic analysis, XU Jianchu's research team from KIB revealed 50 ways to exploit fungi industrially in biotechnology.
Furthermore, the team cooperated with international colleagues on the case to systematically analyze the prospects for industrial exploitation and point out the direction for further fungal biotechnological research and industrial investment.
This research provides research methods and ways for the industrial utilization and industrial exploitation of fungal resources, and also provides foundational material for the research of fungi in industry, medicine, agriculture, animal husbandry, forestry, and environmental protection.
Fungal industrial park relying on an integrated agroforestry and livestock ecosystem
Strategies against human disease
1. Antibacterial antibiotics
2. Antimycotics
3. Biofilm inhibitors
4. Anti-cancer agents
5. Anti-diabetes
6. Improving nerve functioning
7. Fungi in Traditional Chinese Medicine
8. Cardiovascular disease control by fungi
9. Antiviral agents
10. Immunosuppressive and immunomodulatory agents from fungi
Strategies against plant disease
11. Biocontrol of plant disease using endophytes
12. Biocontrol of insects using fungi
13. Biocontrol of nematodes and fungal nematizides
14. Biocontrol of weeds and herbicides from fungi
15. Fungal antagonists used in post-harvest disease control
16. Bio control of rusts and smuts by antagonistic fungi
Enhancing crops and forestry
17. Biofertilizers
18. Arbuscular mycorrhizae as biofertilizers
19. Application of ectomycorrhizal fungi in forestry
20. Use of orchid mycorrhizae and endophytes in biotechnology
21. Growth promoting hormones from fungi
22. Mitigating abiotic stress in plants: the endophyte method
Food and beverages from fungi
23. Growing mushrooms in compost
24. Growing mushrooms in bags
25. Growing mushrooms in the field
26. Modern mushroom production: an automated factory process
27. New edible mushrooms
28. Agaricus subrufescens
29. Using fungi to enhance food value
30. Food colouring from filamentous fungi
31. Food flavouring
32. What is mushroom stock? Products, process and flavours
33. Fungi in making tea
34. Wine, beer and spirits
35. Functional foods and nutraceuticals
36. Harvesting the untapped probiotic potential of fungi
Saving the planet
37. Agricultural waste disposal
38. Mycoremediation: Fungi to the rescue
38. Mycoremediation: Fungi to the rescue
40. Biomass to biofuel: unmasking the potential of lesser-known fungi
41. Packed-bed bioreactor for mycomaterial production
42. Fungal degradation of plastics: A hidden treasure for green environment
43. Polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon degradation by basidiomycetes
44. Can fungi help modify the sustainable soil enhancer biochar?
Studies of fungi provide new knowledge of harmful mutations in cells
Long-lived mushrooms that grow in 'fairy rings' accumulate surprisingly few mutations over time. This finding indicates that their protection against harmful mutations is well developed. The results, to be published in the esteemed journal Current Biology, are interesting in terms of both medicine and evolutionary biology.
In the current study, the researchers used fairy rings of Marasmius oreades, combined with whole genome DNA sequencing, to study mutations. The number of mutations proved to be strikingly small given the number of cell divisions that had taken place.
"In studying mutations, you often use cell lines at the lab, which isn't practical over long periods. In fairy rings, we can at one time-point study the emergence and accumulation of mutations over many years, and also in the organism's natural environment. Interestingly, we found far fewer mutations than we expected," says Markus Hiltunen, doctoral student and lead author of the study.
The results indicate that such long-lived fungi have a capacity to protect themselves against an accumulation of harmful mutations. In-depth study of the cell processes in these fungi can therefore provide important new knowledge about the challenges that need resolving to make their longevity attainable.
"The mechanism facilitating this protection is currently unknown, but leading candidates are extremely effective DNA repair systems or asymmetric DNA division during cell division, where mutated DNA may be left behind as the fungus grows outward. But this needs to be clarified in new studies," says Hanna Johannesson, who heads the research group at Uppsala University.
There will be mushrooms to be had as summer winds down and fall approaches, but supplies could be tight at times and prices may be a bit higher than usual, US grower-shippers say.
Compost problems and limited labor availability have put a damper on shipments from some areas.
Life on Mars? NASA's Curiosity rover snaps photos of mushrooms
Images from the surface of Mars reveal the presence of mushrooms, a group of scientists claim in a controversial new study.
It states some images captured by NASA's Curiosity show fungi is growing on the surface of the supposedly barren planet.
Dr Regina Dass, of the department of microbiology at the school of life sciences, India, the study's co-author said: 'There are no geological or other abiogenic forces on Earth which can produce sedimentary structures, by the hundreds, which have mushroom shapes, stems, stalks, and shed what looks like spores on the surrounding surface,' the Express reports.
'In fact, fifteen specimens were photographed by NASA growing out of the ground in just three days.'
It remains unknown why life may have sprouted on Mars but it is possible conditions are more suitable for cultivating life underground than on the surface.
In literal terms, a student team from Damien High School in La Verne created a science experiment that’s out of this world.
Among the team members is Dylan McKenzie of Chino Hills.
The experiment, to test growth patterns of Enoki mushrooms, was chosen along with 37 other experiments for Mission 13 on the International Space Station as part of a study on the effects of microgravity on organisms.
The experiments launched July 25 and are expected to return to Earth four to six weeks later.
The Damien team, also comprised of Anthony Ebiner, Curtis Lin and Kotoi Wu, will evaluate microgravity effects on the mushrooms that return from the space station compared with the same experiment conducted on Earth.
Next summer, the students' experiments and findings will be presented at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C.
Dylan said he was inspired to work with fungi after watching a YouTube video titled “Do Plants Think?”
It showed how plants can sense their environment and orient themselves to their environment.
The team worked three months to produce a five-page research proposal titled “Flammulina velutipes growth in microgravity.”
The proposal states that mushrooms require little light, and according to two scientists’ theories, they can also detect and respond to gravity.
A July 25 news release from NASA titled “SpaceX Dragon en Route to Space Station with NASA Science, Cargo” states that the microgravity experiments could yield information that aids in engineering other plants to grow better on the Moon and Mars, as well as on Earth; lead to new technologies, medical treatments and products that improve life on Earth; and help NASA learn how to keep astronauts healthy during long-duration space travel.
Mushrooms have long been used in medicine in cultures throughout the world, but recently, they have grown in popularity as a supplement in the health and wellness field. Also known as medicinal mushrooms, these curious supplements promise some pretty amazing health benefits. More than 2,000 species of edible mushrooms exist on the planet, and extensive scientific research has shown they are incredibly powerful for their ability to improve your overall well being. Let’s dive in.
IMMUNE SYSTEM BOOSTING Reishi mushrooms have shown to have a direct impact on boosting the vital components of your immune system, essentially priming immune cells to be more effective in responding to infection and attacks. By increasing the count of immune white blood cells called macrophages, mushrooms can allow your immune system to work more efficiently than ever.
A POWERFUL NOOTROPIC
Nootropics are compounds that contribute to overall brain health, and mushrooms are some of the most powerful out there. The compounds found in Lion’s Mane have been shown to stimulate neurons, triggering a process called re-myelination. This keeps your neurons healthy and ensures they maintain their ability to work at an efficient level. It has also been shown to improve short-term memory, prevent the breakdown of visual recognition memory, and delay the onset of cognitive dysfunction.
IMPROVE EXERCISE PERFORMANCE Cordyceps mushrooms have been shown to dilate the aorta, the main artery in your body that is responsible for supplying blood to your entire circulatory system. It is also a rich source of adenosine, a compound that makes you produce more energy for your body’s cells. This can lead to increased stamina and overall athletic performance.
FIGHT FREE RADICALS
Free radicals are harmful compounds found in your body that contribute to cellular damage leading to a variety of health problems, including aging. To keep free radicals in check, your body needs to have a quality source of antioxidants. Mushrooms, like the Chaga, contain a whole host of powerful antioxidants and can even help stimulate your body’s innate antioxidant systems.
As you can see, mushrooms can be a powerful addition to your daily health and wellness routine. If you’re thinking of adding medicinal mushrooms to your routine, there are several ways to take them. You can get them in the form of powders which can be added to your morning coffee or tea. A more convenient option is buying a mushroom extract complex, which contains a spectrum of different mushroom varieties
How fungi will give form to the future of food: A conversation with Ecovative’s Eben Bayer
Nature has held our delicate global ecosystem in the balance for millennia, so it’s no surprise that scientists and entrepreneurs consistently look to nature for answers to one of humankind’s most difficult challenges: how to build a sustainable future. Fungi — the group of organisms associated with mushrooms — have a successful niche as nature’s ultimate recyclers, breaking down dead materials and making their nutrients available for new life. But what if fungi could also be the builders of a new era?
Myco-materials—materials created from mycelia, the root-like parts of fungi—are gaining attention as a sustainable alternative for a wide range of materials. They are strong, flexible, heat resistant, non-toxic, and highly insulating. Currently, they are being used as insulation, sustainable packaging, foam inserts, and even eco “leather.” But this is just the beginning. Fungi grow rapidly and can be coaxed into any number of shapes, textures, or densities. In fact, mycelium bricks are pound-for-pound stronger than concrete. The potential for myco-materials seems almost limitless.
SynBioBeta recently spoke with Eben Bayer, co-founder and CEO of Ecovative Design, a leader in the myco-materials space. He discussed Ecovative’s new venture into sustainable foods as well as how myco-materials could play a role in space-travel.
Mushrooms Are The New ‘It’ Ingredient For Skincare And Here’s Why
While research has always been rife that mushrooms can boost your immune system – they’ve been used in the Far East to treat allergies, arthritis, bronchitis and even cancer of the lungs for centuries - skin experts have now started to realise the benefits of putting them in their beauty products and it’s totally changing the game.
Mushrooms are packed with Vitamin D and niacin which help soothe sunburn, minimise pore and alleviate the effects of rosacea, while boasting healing properties that can reduce redness, inflammation and irritation while helping you glow from the inside out. What’s more, they’re also packed with high levels of antioxidants which help combat free radical damage caused by exposure to the sun and pollution. Who’d have thought it?
Ones to watch are kombucha mushrooms which improve the skin tone and reduce lines and wrinkles, infused in a number of great anti-ageing creams. Shitake mushroom-infused products are also worth looking out for, too, due to the fact they are rich in proteins, lipids, vitamins and amino acids. Reishi mushrooms are the ones that are good for anti-inflammatory action thanks to their high anti-oxidant level.
We’ve rounded up a list of some of our favourite mushroom-laded beauty products if you’d like to get in on the action, which we highly recommend that you do. Just a little food for thought…
Finland: Berry pickers' shortage after Thai trafficking case
While raspberries, cranberries and blueberries ripen in Finland, the firms can’t keep up, after Thailand decreased the number of berry picking visas.
Where 3,500 Thai were granted a seasonal visa for Finland in 2017, that number decreased to 2,500 in 2018. Merely 2,400 have been allowed to go to the Northern country to pick berries for the 2019 season.
Finnish firms are therefore desperate and ready to employ seasonal workers from other Asian countries according to the Finnish news media Yle.
Mushroom-picking robot? Salmon Arm firm on the cutting-edge of robotic design
A Salmon Arm company is working on the cutting edge of technological design, developing robots with vision and producing technology which 10 years ago simply didn't exist.
But if you're thinking C-3PO, don't. These robots are masters at cheese cutting, sandwich packing and coming soon, mushroom picking.
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