Abstract
Living fungal mycelium with abolished ability to form fruiting bodies is a self-healing substance, which is particularly valuable for further engineering and development as materials sensing environmental changes and secreting signals. Suppression of fruiting body formation is also a useful tool for maintaining the stability of a mycelium-based material with ease and lower cost. The objective of this study was to provide a biochemical solution to regulate the fruiting body formation, which may replace heat killing of mycelium in practice. The concentrations of glycogen synthase kinase-3 (GSK-3) inhibitors, such as lithium chloride or CHIR99021 trihydrochloride, were found to directly correlate with the development of fruiting bodies in the mushroom forming fungi such as Coprinopsis cinerea and Pleurotus djamor. Sensitive windows to these inhibitors throughout the fungal life cycle were also identified. We suggest the inclusion of GSK-3 inhibitors in the cultivation recipes for inhibiting fruiting body formation and regulating mycelium growth. This is the first report of using a GSK-3 inhibitor to suppress fruiting body formation in living fungal mycelium-based materials. It provides an innovative strategy for easy, reliable, and low cost maintenance of materials containing living fungal mycelium.
Highlights
The development of fungal mycelium-based materials has beed fast over the past decade
We demonstrated that LiCl and CHIR99021 trihydrochloride inhibited fruiting body formation, whereas cisplatin accelerated fruiting body development
The mycelium treated with 6g/L LiCl stopped growing before reaching the edge of the petri dish. These results showed that LiCl of higher concentrations had stronger inhibitory effect on C. cinerea fruiting body development
Summary
The development of fungal mycelium-based materials has beed fast over the past decade. Mycelium is the vegetative structure of fungi and is mainly composed of natural polymers. Living mycelium-based materials have a wide range of applications due to their self-assembly, self-healing, environmentally responsive nature, along with their moldable and tunable properties during growth. It is a great thermal insulator on top of its strength, durability and other beneficial features [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13]. The mycelium of typical mushroom-forming fungi aggregates to form mushrooms, which are the fruiting bodies spreading spores[14].
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