Sponsored Projects for Undergraduate Research

A key goal of green technology is to sequester CO2 in construction materials at large scale. Fungi that grow as threads or filaments—like those of fuzzy mold on a slice of bread—hold great promise as a platform toward this end. Perhaps surprisingly, the network of filaments in a fungal colony is well-suited to compression and use in building materials. Furthermore, fungi grow readily on crop wastes that would otherwise release CO2 upon disposal. This carbon-abating “mycelial brick” technology, though exciting, is in its infancy. To advance toward widespread adoption in the building industry, we need to improve the physical properties of mycelial materials, and we need to make them at scale. Fungal genetic engineering is in principle an appealing route toward such refinements; for any such effort we need to know which fungal genes to manipulate. The current project seeks to address this question and dissect the genetic basis of fungal brick strength.

Our experiment is a genome-wide screen using natural differences in fungal strains from the wild, proceeding in several steps. First, we make bricks from many natural isolates of a given mold species, Neurospora crassa, and quantify brick strength for each. Next, we track the genomes of the wild strains to identify DNA sequence variants that predict, and are likely causal for, the differences in their brick characteristics. Finally, we make transgenic fungal strains to validate the inferred role in brick strength of natural variants, and the genes in which they lie.

This is a great project for students committed to microbial genetics who are ready to work hard on a difficult but important problem.