Abstract

The use of both naturally occurring and synthetic pigmented wood has been prevalent in woodcraft for centuries. Modern manifestations generally involve either woodworkers’ aniline dyes, or pigments derived from a special class of fungi known as spalting fungi. While fungal pigments are more renewable than anilines and pose less of an environmental risk, the carrier required for these pigments—dichloromethane (DCM)—is both problematic for humans and tends to only deposit the pigments on the surface of wood instead of evenly within the material. Internal coloration of wood is key to adoption of a pigmenting system by woodworkers. To address this issue, five solvents that had moderate solubility with the pigments extracted from Chlorociboria aeruginosa and Scytalidium cuboideum were identified, in the hopes that a reduction in solubility would result in a greater amount of the pigment deposited inside the wood. Of the tested solvents, acetonitrile was found to produce the highest internal color in ash, Douglas-fir, madrone, mountain hemlock, Port-Orford cedar, Pacific silver fir, red alder and sugar maple. While these carrier solvents are not ideal for extracting the pigments from the fungi, acetonitrile in particular does appear to allow for more pigment to be deposited within wood. The use of acetonitrile over DCM offers new opportunities for possible industrial spalting applications, in which larger pieces of wood could be uniformly pigmented and sold to the end user in larger quantities than are currently available with spalted wood.

Highlights

  • Spalting is the term used for any coloration of wood caused by fungi [1,2]

  • This paper explores alternative carrier solvents for their use with resolubilized fungal dyes from

  • The second most effective solvent was acetone, as it was effective in four wood species, with eight treatments overall in that group

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Summary

Introduction

Spalting is the term used for any coloration of wood caused by fungi [1,2]. White rot fungi bleaches wood, as their enzymes remove primary lignin [3,4]. Most are Ascomycetes [8] These fungi use their pigments as a method of resource capture when competing against other fungi on decaying wood [9]. This feature is used for laboratory pigment production, as the inclusion of sterilized, white-rotted wood into growing media can stimulate pigment production in spalting fungi [10]. The most well-known pigmenting fungi (in terms of woodworking) are Chlorociboria spp. [11,12,13], as their secondary metabolite, xylindein, pigments wood in blue-green shades [9,14,15,16,17,18]

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