Arthur Cole 0:21

Welcome back to the Newt Podcast. With me, Arthur Cole. Join us for a walk through the estate with our invited guests to the backdrop of the Somerset landscape and its wildlife residence. This week, we return to the Bristol Fungarium to meet the team of mycologists who are working on pioneering research in the field of functional mushrooms. We journey through the fungarium learning about how they selectively breed strains growing on from mycelium in Petri dishes in the lab to virtual forests of mushrooms in the fruiting chambers to harvesting and extracting the functional compounds. This episode is recorded in the fungarium, and we get close to the very machinery of the operation. Let's jump straight into it.

SPEAKER_01 1:38

It's so important that we've uh due to the uh pressing heat we've been experiencing, it's taken precedence over the incubation room. So we've actually moved mushrooms out of there so that we can play doubles.

Arthur Cole 1:52

So we're about to walk into what do we call the what do we call the barn?

SPEAKER_01 1:56

We call it a barn. We call it a barn. And uh we've got Emma on our right who's busy uh clearing up as for normal.

Arthur Cole 2:04

So we're with Emma here. We've walked into the barn. This is the main this is the main extraction area.

SPEAKER_01 2:11

Oh I've got a gift for you actually, uh Arthur. You can choose a cat. You can either have mushroom farmer, that's farmer with a pH. That is moral with a club. The moral support club. That's moral with an E. As in Morel, yes. We have support your local mushroom dealer, or we have Feed Me to the Mycelium.

Arthur Cole 2:36

Oh, I do like I'm I'm probably gonna go with Feed Me to the Mycelium. Oh, okay.

SPEAKER_01 2:41

You like the dark blue, do you?

Arthur Cole 2:42

So we've got for a navy blue cap, Bristol Fungarium official merch here. Um, we're and I'm advertising um what happens if if I'm found unconscious at any point in the next couple of years. Hopefully, I got my cap on and you can feed me to the myc.

SPEAKER_01 2:59

Excellent. Well, we'll all land up that way anyway. Well, I suppose not if we're burnt. So we're just walking through here, big uh extraction things for getting all the steam and heat out and making sure there's clean energy. And then we're just walking into one of the official business. We're walking into the official business here. This is one of the incubation rooms uh where after we've made the mushrooms that we'll go and see now, and here we have Louie and Ella.

Arthur Cole 3:22

Hello Louis, hello Ella. So for the listeners, we have walked into how we're on right now. We are on right now. So we've walked into um uh we've walked into quite a large um part of the barn, and the first thing that hits you is what Tom was talking about, the table tennis, the table right in the centre, and surrounding it, we've got um layered on uh trolleys with six shelves on each with bags two, four, six, eight, ten bags.

SPEAKER_01 3:55

There's fifty bags on each trolley. At the moment, there's one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, because we used to have about 40 in here, but we're having to prioritize table tennis at the moment. And so uh you'll go into the fruiting chamber and you'll see that in a sec. Uh, and these are just the mycelium is running through the substrate. The substrate is 80% beet sawdust and 20% um wheat ran, organic wheat ran. Because they run through there, and then once the mycelium has totally encapsulated the bag, so you have a sort of white uh block through it all. Um we then put it in the fruiting chamber. But maybe we should take a step back and go and see where it all starts. So we're now back into the big barn. In the background, you can hear the noise of the uh mixer, uh, which is mixing. If you get up here, you can have a look.

SPEAKER_03 4:46

Okay, so this is a big silver, uh big stainless steel ribbon mixer. Wow, okay. So we're looking into this.

Arthur Cole 4:54

There is um there's a a hose uh attached to a sprinkler. Actually, it looks very high-tech, looks like the sort of thing we'd have in the garden. And then there's this, not it's like an auger, what it what would you call it? Well, it's a ribbon mixer. It's a ribbon mixer. So it's about sort of in diameter, it's about what four feet, three feet, four feet?

SPEAKER_01 5:16

Four feet by uh three feet, maybe.

Arthur Cole 5:19

And it is what we've got in here is a brown, a brown mix, a brown mush. Um, what is the brown mush?

SPEAKER_01 5:27

So this is 80% beach sawdust and 20% organic wheat bran. And what we've got on the sprinkler is a little uh little basic uh monitor that tells us how much liquid is going in. And so we're trying to get this up to around about 63% uh moisture content because mushrooms are you know fundamentally a bit like us 90% water, uh well a bit a bit less than 90%. And so we're just mixing this up, and then once this has got up to the correct moisture content, we'll then dump it out of there, mix it into bags there, weigh them, and then put them into the other large stainless steel box behind you, which is a uh steam-driven, yeah, sort of we inoculate, or we don't inoculate bags, we uh cook them for about 18 hours at 100% uh 100 degrees, and that basically kills any of the uh nasties in there that we don't want.

Arthur Cole 6:26

Potential contaminants.

SPEAKER_01 6:27

Contaminants, and will also stop the mycidium from running as quickly.

Arthur Cole 6:31

Okay, so uh well then where does this beach um where do you get the beach from?

SPEAKER_01 6:36

Is this uh it is from the UK um becomes penetized and in here, so we're going back to where it all starts. Wow, okay.

Arthur Cole 6:45

So we've just come past a uh door that's uh slid back, sort of like Star Trek, I guess. And now we are entering into this a low-ceiling room. There are uh sheets up, actually, there's a little bit of X files about this room.

SPEAKER_01 7:02

Well, so this is the uh the lab. So what we have here is we have a HEPA filter at the bottom there. So a what sort of filter? A HEPA filter, which basically is a clean air filter, um, and so that pulls the air into here, and then we have another HEPA filter here, which is basically pushing out sterile air, so we have like positive pressure, so there's always air going out to keep it clean in here. And so this is where Joey, for example, if we were to find the mushroom in the wild, we would then bring it in here, take a cutting, put it onto one of these little plates.

Arthur Cole 7:36

So we're looking at a it, I mean, it really is like a lab in here. It's uh white surfaces, there's a not ultraviolet, there's a purple light light coming from underneath, and there are agar um, what looks like agar Petri dishes, um, all with different codes and um and dates on them. And as Thomas just pulled out this uh one of these agar dishes, we can see in there that there's a white filamous, almost like dusting or powder growing on the surface of that just off-white agar. What are we looking at there?

SPEAKER_01 8:15

So this one's actually aloe. So this uh is a frotus ostriatus. So this one is a type of oyster mushroom. Um, this one is actually found in the woods about a kilometre from us here. And so what we do is we take a cutting of the mushroom, put it on the uh the petri dish. The agar we're using there is is mainly potato starch, and then it grows out. And when we take it from the wild, there's obviously a lot of contamination, and so we'll need to take cuttings from the leading edge of the mushroom. Uh the leading edge of the mycenaeum, if there are any in here, you can see here's this is actually a spore collection, so these are spores that we've got, which we're trying to grow out. So, what Joey also does here is we do breeding work, so we try and um take a commercial strain, for example, of lion's mane, which has certain compounds in that we're interested in. We breed it with our local native strains and trying to create hybrids that have higher uh compound profiles in certain areas, so that you know ones that we know are good from a human health perspective. And so Joey's done I don't know how many hybridizations now, about 16, I think, in total. But obviously, it's quite a long process because mushrooms, when they reproduce, they they create these sort of clamps, so you'll get one particular comp uh particular thing from one mushroom, and then it'll form a clamp with one of the ones from the other ones. But quite often what happens they form these clamps, and when you look at them under the microscope here, it looks like they formed a clamp, but they can within four or five days decide to release and not actually form that clamp. So they're quite uh touchy lovers, shall we say, and they even when it looks like they've formed a bond, frequently they then separate. So it's a bit like having a first, second, third date, and then deciding we're not actually going to make love tonight. I think I think it's best we go our separate ways. Um, and that's one of the issues with mushrooms, that they are considerably more complicated to breed than plants. So we're looking for particular compounds in, say, for example, I don't know, oyster that we've got here, we'll be looking at ergothionine and trying to find one which is a higher level of ergothionine so that we can grow that one. So when we're doing the extracts, we get a product which has higher levels of ergothionine than the other ones. But it's a very long process, like we've been doing this for probably three and a half years now, and we've got some hybrids that are better in certain compounds, but ironically enough, with our uh original strain from Somerset of Lion's Male, it is so much higher than any of the other ones that we've found, and also higher than any of the hybrids that we've created. So, you know, nature sometimes creates things better than we can uh manipulate them. So, yeah, so this is where it all starts basically, and then from here, once um we've got a clean plate, we'll then take a cutting and we'll put it into this here.

Arthur Cole 11:17

So we're looking at some kilner jars here. There is um different uh colours of liquid in the kilner jar. It's um they're all about a third full with the liquid, um, and they've all got a um what looks like an accession number or a or a code on there again with a date. And Tom, what's this one you've got in your hand?

SPEAKER_01 11:37

So this one is a Ganoderma form. Who knows? We need Jerry here. I'm not entirely certain which one that is. But what we've done on all of these is we've got like a little injectable port and a uh little patch to allow for the exchange of oxygen. Right. The um the liquid is in essence honeywater, and so what we'll do is we'll take a cutting from the Petri dish, place it into the honey water, and then we have stirrers where, so for example, this here, on the bottom of them we put in little magnetic bars, and then we'll put them on the uh stirrer plate, which you see in a lot of pharmaceutical companies. Yeah. Uh this one isn't plugged in, uh, and then that just spins them and creates more surface area so the mycelium grows faster. Right. And then inside it you can see a lot of um, they look like lumps of sort of gristle almost. Um, and this is the mycelium that's that's growing, and once that is up to you know, a fairly dense mixture, we'll then put a uh syringe in there, suck up a load of that uh myceliated water, and then we'll inject it into a bag of grain. Um, normally wheat grain we use, um, and then we'll let the mycelium run on the wheat grain, and then we use that to inoculate the bags of substrate, which you saw earlier getting mixed in the uh ribbon mixer.

Arthur Cole 13:00

So those sort of globule forms in there. Anyone who's done their own kombucha will be familiar with those uh colonies, I guess, uh those um those cultures forming in that liquid. This is a very similar looking, very similar looking, very similar.

SPEAKER_01 13:18

Yeah, yeah, no, and also when uh when you leave them, we've probably got some here. There you go. So, for example, that one it's like a white cap that that goes across the the top of the very similar exactly to what you're saying in terms of yeah, so it's like a scoby. Right, exactly, it's like a mother. Yeah. Um and so uh yeah, and obviously if you leave them to go too long, they get too solid, and then you can't actually get them into a syringe. Right. So that one, for example, has probably already gone that far. Um and then so after that, we've got all those, we've we've filled up our syringe, and then we will uh as you can see here, there's a huge quantity of different. I mean, there's probably So we've moved out of the lab now, and we're into a different part of the shed, and we are looking at these petri dishes, and it's you can see this is a cross, so this is one of the hybrid hybrids that Joey's trying to create at the moment, and there's literally hundreds of these. So, what would he be trying to cross here?

Arthur Cole 14:14

Not completely different species. No, you can't we can't we've you're looking to cross strains of the same species.

SPEAKER_01 14:20

The same species, and we're very fortunate that we've got Piam, who uh used to work at Glaxo and Pfizer, um, who works for us down in Devon and does a lot of HPLC analysis. So we can high performance liquid chromatography, which enables us to count the quantity of compounds uh in our product or in the mycelium of our hybrids or in the fruiting body of our hybrids. So without having the analytical chemistry on the back end, all of this is completely pointless because there's no way of knowing what you're doing. Um, and so in particular for lion's vein, we're doing some tests on certain lion's mane mycelium to see if we can create if any of our hybrids express more uh of two compounds called eranacenes um and haristamines as well. And so, yeah, and no one else in the UK does this because it takes a long time, and you've got to have an analytical chemist on the back end, so it's expensive, and there's very little uh guarantee of success. Uh so but you know, so why are you doing it with all of that um potential risk? Well, you know, you're only here once, and uh you know, you're trying to do it. What you want to do probably, and also it's quite interesting. It's a lot, it's a lot more interesting than not doing it. Yeah, um, and so it unfortunately doesn't help with uh selling product, but it does help with um sort of knowing what you're doing. And so here we've sort of just gone around the corner from the lab, and we're now in uh a space with three four-foot wide, so we've got like I don't know, whatever this is, 12-foot wide uh bench here with three hepa filters across the front, and this is where we've got these solid blocks that have been cooked and are compressed now that have gone through the steam sterilizer, and we will open these up in front of the um the filters here, get a bag of the grain spawn that we injected with the syringe, um, and then we'll put a spoonful of grain spawn into each of these bags and then seal them here. Uh, and then we will put them into the inoculating room, which you saw earlier, where Ella and Louis were playing table tennis, and then we'll keep them in there from anywhere from two weeks to three months before they go into the fruiting chamber, uh, which I'll show you now. Off to you, Alpha.

SPEAKER_00 16:50

Oh, there's Joey.

SPEAKER_02 16:52

Hello, hi, I'm Arthur.

SPEAKER_00 16:55

Um, I'm Joey, so I'm the lab manager uh slash in charge of production. Um, so I'm pretty much essentially involved in all the production side of things, so I culture the mushrooms uh that we get sent or we collect, back those genetics up so we can use them indefinitely and keep well, there's a whole kind of process to keeping the genetics viable. Uh but then I do all the production, so produce the grain spawn that we then add to our substrate. Um in charge of all that. We've got a few interesting things going on. We're doing like a lion's mane breeding project where we're taking uh native lion's mane, collecting spores, and then doing hybridization and crosses and stuff to try and find um yeah, genetic outliers that kind of have more metabol kind of the secondary metabolites that we're trying to extract. Um but yeah, that's pretty much it. But yeah, pretty busy, like lots of farming, it's pretty full-on, lots of manual labour. Um so yeah, jam-packed weeks. Um get about half a day in the lab where I get to do all the really, really interesting stuff the rest of the time. It's kind of grunt work, just making bags, inoculating bags, that kind of thing.

Arthur Cole 18:01

And how did you get into this?

SPEAKER_00 18:03

Um just as a hobby grower, about 15 years ago, started growing mushrooms at home, and it was one of those things. So I ordered a kit online, and then as soon as the kit arrived, it was I had a realization that I knew nothing about mushrooms. Like because a box just comes and it's just like, oh, add this and add that. So from that moment on, really, just became obsessed, started foraging, and then doing little bits of cultivation at home, but it was when I started pouring agar plates that I really fell in love with the lab, and it's very quiet, very meticulous. And so as soon as I started doing that, I fell in love with lab work and kind of like became obsessed with that. So foraging took a backseat, and cultivation became the main thing that I was interested in, trying to grow these things rather than just go out and collect them. Um yeah.

Arthur Cole 18:48

So Tom has told us a little bit um about uh how you try to breed uh in that lab. Um this is not we've we don't have a lot of people who are uh horticulturists and gardeners who listen to our podcast. Um breeding um mushrooms, uh breeding different fungies um is not the same, is it?

SPEAKER_00 19:10

No, so um they're quite different. So to get um a mushroom, you need two single spores that germinate and then they come together, and if they're compatible, uh then they'll grow together and then they'll form a mushroom. Um so breeding with mushrooms is quite a laborious process. You have to isolate single spores. So we do that through a process of serial dilution, so we'll collect a spore print, which will have like millions of spores, and then we do serial dilution of that, so we'll kind of keep diluting a solution with spores in it until we get a really low number that we can then put on a plate, and then we take out those single spore isolations, and then we put them on another plate, and then we have a collection of all these single score isolations which are essentially half of the genetics we need to make a mushroom. And then it's a process of pairing these up, seeing which ones uh grow together, and then fruiting them, and then exploring whether they're quicker, whether they're kind of um kind of like withstand uh contamination, that kind of stuff. But mainly we're looking for biomass and like vigor, so how quickly they grow and stuff, and then we're sending the samples off to chemist to get the analysis of the mushrooms after that. So it's quite a laborious process, quite boring, but then it's really really exciting when you get to the point where you're like, okay, this mushroom's never existed before, let's see what happens. And we're only just scratching the surface with it. We've done about 18 or 19 crosses at the moment, and we've got some fruiting out, but it's all to play for really with mushrooms. This kind of hybridization and selection, but we haven't done any of that um yet with fungi, or it's in its very early stages, so it's really exciting to see. You know, we don't really know what we're gonna uncover genetically with by doing this process, so it's really exciting. Well, a brave new world! Yes, yeah, exactly. Yeah, brave new world, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 21:17

As you can see, more table tennis. The tournament continues different players.

Arthur Cole 21:23

Okay, so in here oh wow, okay, so we have now entered into what looks like I I mean this this is this does look like a scene off of a sci-fi film. It's like something if you've ever watched The Martian or I guess Project Hell Mary or or Interstellar, we've now walked into a room. Well, tell us what we've walked into, Tommy.

SPEAKER_01 21:49

Well, I've just found out you're definitely into sci-fi, huh? So what we've walked into here is uh where we grow the majority of our Ganoderma. Which are sort of racy in a broad term. So we're actually looking at 14 shelving units with four to five shells on them up to sort of 10 foot in the air, with LED strip lighting on each one, and these sort of alien-looking mushrooms growing up towards the light. And so what we're doing, like you were discussing with Joey, in terms of trying to find mushrooms through hybridization, we're growing 14 different types of Ganiderma here. We've got three UK native strains and nine ones from sort of the Americas and Asia. Again, trying to find mushrooms that are higher in certain compounds, in specific with these ones, it's ganoderic acids, that we know are very good at regulating the transfer of cortisone into active cortisol in the body. And so, from a central nervous system perspective, very good at regulating sort of stress response. And so, you know, up on the top over there, we've got one which is called Ganoderma multiplium, which is actually from mainly from Thailand, which we know actually has high levels of ganoderic acid A, and there's lots of research showing Ganoderic acid A being particularly relevant for people who suffer from epilepsy, downregulating epileptic fits, or the frequency of epileptic fits. Beneath that we've got a black ratio, which is known as Ganoderma. Well, there's two types there's Ganoderma synensis and Ganoderma japonica. These are much slower growing, so these ones, I'm not sure how long these ones have been in here for. So these ones went in in February, so these have been going for whatever that is, four or five months now. Um and we will harvest these after probably six months. Uh what we do do is we you can see at the bottom here, they're sort of filled up with liquid. Uh, this is a metabolite that the mushrooms create as part of their process of you know metabolizing stuff, but this is commonly known as monkey uh monkey mushroom piss. Um we do open these up, and we actually we need to open these up now uh to get them to sort of branch. I'll show you some of the um the buckets down here where we've got mushrooms that are growing sort of in an unrestricted way.

Arthur Cole 24:23

So for the list, I mean we're now opening up a bucket, a large plastic bucket, and inside are three of the substrate packs and what looks like almost woody corals. This would not look out of place on a coral reef. There's three different distinct colours of darkest brown at the base of where it's branching up, um, almost fingers, tendril-like organism, and with this then light sandy brown with a white tip right at the uh at the end.

SPEAKER_01 24:56

And the white tip is the leading edge, which will actually have the spore surface on it in time. So because they're still growing up in this sort of conch fashion, you can see the sort of the zigzag shape of some of them. That's entirely down to if we were to basically them chasing the light. So you can grow these in zigzags and curls just so long as you're on it, uh moving them around a lot. And what's quite interesting here, you can see a um japonica that's out, and you can see that the conks are starting to show, and that one at the back's very beautiful, actually.

unknown 25:30

That one.

Arthur Cole 25:30

So really different colour here. So the japonica that Tom spoke about is very dark, much darker, almost, you know, sort of going towards a mahogany um uh darkness in its fruiting body, with almost like antler-like um ends coming up with this um ribbing that goes through it, uh, uh almost like um the rings of a tree.

SPEAKER_01 25:54

Tree, tree rings, exactly. And you can see this one here, which is called Tiger Lingzi, which is uh a sort of cousin of the most frequently grown Ganoderma in China, which is Ganoderma Lingshu. Um, and this is uh a cousin of that one, but it's got amazing banding all the way around. Um, it's one of the more beautiful ones. I mean, these ones in here, which uh I'll show you, which have very different morphology to them. But these ones have huge. You look at the size of the ones there.

Arthur Cole 26:25

Okay, so something completely yeah. So the ones that we've been looking at, the branching fruity bodies that come up are uh with a circumference really on each uh tendril that comes up, no more than about a centimetre or a centimetre or two centimetres. These are enormous fellows.

SPEAKER_01 26:41

These are this is one from Oregon actually, um another type of Ganoderma. Um, but this has a huge sort of conch-like figure to it. I mean, this one here is what 25 centimetres across. Yeah, and again, it's a question of finding out what is actually in these from a compound perspective, because the reality is that you know, from a commercial angle, you're looking obviously for weight, so you want the mushrooms to have a good amount of weight to them, so that when you're obviously turning them into product at the end, you actually don't have to grow thousands more bags because unfortunately, ones like this one here, which is as you can see, it's just got one sort of large conch circumference-wise, probably four or five centimetres, but there's only one in this bag, so weight-wise, you'd be looking at I don't know, a couple of hundred grams, and then when you dry it, so 20 grams, so you'd get like one bottle of tincture out of that, and you're having to wait six months for one bottle of tincture, so it's not the most efficient way of doing it. We are actually going to bring out a product which has 12 different uh ganodermas in it in probably about three or four months' time, but I mean it's it's kind of extraordinary to see how these things grow. So in the wild they will form a conch, but because they're in these bags, they're growing up looking for oxygen, and so quite often they will actually grow out of the filter patch. You can see here.

Arthur Cole 28:07

So the mice so the fruiting body of the micro is breaking free of its plastic, um uh plastic bag and going through the microporous tape, which allows gas to pass through the bag.

SPEAKER_01 28:21

And so uh, so yeah, I mean it's quite I mean, these look absolutely stunning, and maybe you could take a couple back with you today to show uh to show everyone. That'd be great. And um, yeah, so this one's kept at about 18-19 degrees. Um, and then I'll take you into the fruiting chamber now where most of them are. Oh, remarkably, no one is playing table tennis. So you can see here this um this green contamination in these bags. Right. So this is trichoderma, and this probably came in on the grain when we put the grain into the bags, and so we normally lose sort of less than three or four percent, but this obviously is a particularly bad batch. Okay, and trichoderma interestingly is very useful to um for tomato blight, and so actually, there's a Swiss company that uh makes millions a year out of selling trichoderma, and so these can be quite useful if you are a you know commercial tomato farmer just chucking some of these bags in your polytunnel that has or glasshouse that has them.

Arthur Cole 29:22

Okay, so we're looking at um grain that has no uh we can't see any fruiting, any desired fruiting bodies coming up, but we can see a white mycelium through the plastic and this almost um uh greeny blue uh darkness to it, and that's the trichoderma. That's the trichoderma that Tom's talking about, which um not good for mushrooms, but very good for uh tomatoes. And and why and is that because we're gonna talk a bit more when we go for a walk outside about the evolution of uh fungi and how they operate, but for the company that is growing trichoderma in order to give out to commercial tomato farmers, is this because the trichoderma is pre its food is um the things, the blight, which is the bite a fungi or is it the bike?

SPEAKER_01 30:13

No, it's a it's a fungi.

Arthur Cole 30:15

So this is a fungi that eats another, that preys on another.

SPEAKER_01 30:18

Yeah, and there are lots of those parasitic fungus. Um, you know, there are lots of different classes of fungus. The fungus that we're growing here is predominantly stapotrophic, so a wood decomposer, and predominantly it's the heartwoods that these eat in the wild. Turkey tail is not a heartwood, uh heart rot fungi, but the vast majority of the ones that we grow here are heart rock fungi. And so now we're into the fruiting chamber.

Arthur Cole 30:45

Oh wow, okay, so we've just come in and it's almost like um going off to somebody's parties uh not far outside of the mute. Um we've got what looks like a smoke machine here, and um what's happening?

SPEAKER_01 31:00

What's so what we've got in there is we've got a little uh ultrasonic fogger and a uh you know, just a fan pulling air in and blasting all this uh you know moisture out.

Arthur Cole 31:12

And so it's very atmospheric in here.

SPEAKER_01 31:15

It's very atmospheric. It's normal. Sometimes you can walk in here and not see further than a foot in front of you. Uh we've left the door open today so that we can all see what's going on. And so in here we have uh I don't know how many hundreds, but um roughly speaking, one, two, three, four, five, probably around about fifty, sixty um trolleys with around about, I don't know, 50 or 60 or sometimes more um mushroom blocks on them. And so what we do is the in order to get the mushrooms to fruit, we um fold the bag over and we take a cutting, uh, a little slice, or this one is done in a V. Uh mushrooms have certain triggers to fruit. One of them is uh oxygen exchange, another one is light, and also the other one is obviously how far developed the mycelium is. And so we cut them in here, and it's in these cuts where uh the fruiting body forms, the primordia, and then they fruit out. Obviously, this summer has been particularly hot and it has been uh very, very difficult for the mushrooms. So when mushrooms have certain actions to deal with the heat, they basically speed up their metabolism. And so, what's going to be quite interesting is we're testing uh a lot of the mushrooms that we fruited and harvested when it was 30 odd degrees, um, and it'll be interesting to see how the compound profiles change because I'm sure you're aware with herbs, a lot of those aromatics that you're interested in are actually only created when they're under stress. And so, you know, it's gonna be interesting to see whether or not the same happens with mushrooms because there will definitely be higher or lower levels of certain uh secondary metabolites that we're interested in from a human health perspective. So who knows? Possibly we'll be heating this uh fruiting chamber to create to stress the mushrooms to give us mushrooms that have higher levels of compounds. But you know, judging them purely on an aesthetic basis, they were not happy when it was 30 degrees or even hotter actually. So we do actually pipe in air from the air-conditioned room at 18 degrees. Most mushrooms are happiest between sort of 16, well, sort of 12 to 18, 19, 20 degrees. Um, and so we try and keep those temperatures vaguely here, but it's very difficult to do when the outside temperature gets up to 35. So this is quite an interesting mushroom, this one. This is a sort of cousin to lion's mane. This is another heresium. Uh, this one's called coraloides. If you look here at this one, it really does look like coal.

Arthur Cole 33:48

It really does. Is uh so it's white, almost plumes of coral coming out of these the V-shaped slits in the plastic bag.

SPEAKER_01 33:58

Yeah, so what this is another one of these um mushrooms that isn't really grown that frequently, but I was doing a talk of a year or two ago with the head of research at the Fungoemic Q, and they DNA profiled uh this heresium choleroidas and compared it to um horesium erinasis, which is lion's mane, and interestingly, the uh bunch of DNA uh that they think codes for this particular enzyme, which is useful for producing a lot of these secondary metabolites, um, in particular the horeseenones and the herestanines, which are the ones that we're interested in from a potential brain function perspective. This heresium coloroid has had the same bit of DNA code in it. And so there are two other types of heresium in the UK, um heresium seratum, which is so beautiful, it literally looks like a cloud, hence the name, and then um heresium uh I think it's called flagul flagulum or something. Um, but neither of those two have that chunk of DNA that codes for the the secondary metabolite that's the or this this second this enzyme, which is the first stage and a two-stage process for creating these um compounds we're interested in. So that's the reason we're growing this one to see what's in it and how that compares to the normal Harium erinesis, which is the ones you can see behind us there. Right.

Arthur Cole 35:21

So this is a more cauliflower look, this looks like the florets of cauliflowers now, the this one that we're looking at.

SPEAKER_01 35:28

Yeah, this is the sort of mainstay. So this is actually a clone of um of the one that we found seven, eight years ago now on the uh beech tree over there. And so, you know, what's been remarkable about this particular mushroom that we found, it's higher, about 20% higher in a bunch of compounds we're interested in than about 11 different strains that we've tested. So it's you know highly fortuitous, but we've been spending a lot of time with Joey trying to improve on it and largely failing. So at the moment, nature and specifically, I mean, I think what is interesting is that it may well be the fact that this mushroom has evolved to be here, and so we're literally moving it 300 metres away and growing it, and because of its sort of uh ecological niche in this you know area, that may well be the reason why it produces more of these compounds. It may well be that if we were to find where some of these other commercial strains originated from and then grow them back in their traditional sort of space, they may well exhibit 20% higher levels of these compounds. Because I think you know we're quite ignorant as to how uh naturalized fungi and plants are to their environment. We know it with plants, obviously, that you know they grow in certain areas, but with fungi they tend to grow almost everywhere. Um, so this lion's mane you'll find in pretty much every country in Europe, you find it in North America, you find it in Japan, you find it everywhere. Unlike with plants, where you know they're slightly more dependent upon rain, temperature, and all this sort of stuff. Um so you know, it may well be that the fact that it is being grown very close to its natural space is why it's behaving in a more beneficial manner from a compound perspective. And these little uh florets here, this is actually a project we're doing with a company that is uh harvesting um kelp. And so we're in we're putting about, I can't remember what percentage of um seaweed basically into these, and we are getting around about 15% higher higher um weight of fruiting bodies. And I think you know, we all know how fantastic seaweed is from a you know, just offering absolutely every trace element you could possibly hope for from a body perspective, from a human perspective. I mean, even when you knock your teeth out, if you're anywhere near seaweed, it's a very good idea to wrap them in seaweed because it keeps the tooth alive. I mean, they are seaweed is fantastic, and it seems to be that it genuinely helps with um mushrooms as well. And so there's a few funny projects that we're involved with which actually so those are so this is uh Pirotus, this is a yeah, that's that's actually a that's a summer oyster in that we harvested it in the summer. What's quite interesting with oysters is that there are they're the same species, but they fruit at different times. So that is one that we found fruiting in the summer. Uh it's very pale, sort of creamy, um, creamy white, that one. And then there'll be much darker ones that you find at different times of year. It's also slightly dependent upon how much light they're getting as well. Um, the reason we grow oyster is because of ergothionine content. Uh, it's very high, it's the highest in ergothionine. Ergothionine is a compound that, well, an amino acid that we used to get from our diet, um, in particular off root vegetables. So the only things that make it are bacteria and fungi. You get to it's not entirely true, you get a tiny amount in um chicken liver and an even smaller amount in red kidney beans. Um, but you get like a thousand times more in mushrooms. We used to get a lot of it in our diet through uh the microbes in the soil, but unfortunately, with how we've been farming for you know, sort of post-war, the ergothionine has literally collapsed in our soil, and so we are getting almost zero ergothionine into our diets at the moment. And what is interesting is if you look at certain um sort of long-term debilitating diseases like Alzheimer's and um you know uh dementia, if you test the ergothionine content in these people, it is through the floor. Um it does drop over time, but uh the reality is eating mushrooms in particular, oysters or lion's mane, uh have you will be giving your body access to compounds that it lusts for. So before you eat, your body has ergothionine receptors in all of its organs, and they fire up in anticipation of being able to shift ergothionine around, and we're just not giving them any ergothionine. So my friend Michael, he runs uh a compost club who was on um Gardener's World recently. The one thing he tests for in his uh compost is ergothionine, and so um well it's not the one thing, it's one of the four things he tests for, but it it's it's so important for human health, and we're just simply not getting it in our diets anymore. So um yeah, so I mean it's another reason to buy organic if you can and eat mushrooms. Um and so yeah, just more and more lions made. Um this time of year, there are some raishi here, so you can see all the different sort of forms they take. So, what we've done here is these mushrooms uh we've grown the conks off the top that you saw in the other room, and these are second fruits, and so some of these are now um creating these sort of plate-like structures, uh, and they're up to sort of 25 centimetres across. And again, these are different, different strains from all over the place. Um, we tend to find that with these ones, you get with the conks, uh, you tend to get less of the compounds you're interested in, as you do with the sort of antlers when they're growing up in the bag. But what is interesting, for years when I was foraging, I could never understand why the spores, if you put your finger across the top of this mushroom, you see there's spores on it. Yes.

Arthur Cole 41:26

Um like a light chocolate cookie does.

SPEAKER_01 41:29

And what I could never understand is the spores come out of the bottom of the mushroom, why they would always land up on top. And then I found out that the spores are actually inversely electrically charged the top of the mushroom, so they actually come out and then circle back on top. Oh, here's one of the dark chiponikas that we saw in the other room forming a conch. And so you can see how environment really does affect, you know, what the mushroom looks like. Actually, these ones down here you can see these are actually the the Ganoderma lings, so these are the very popular ones in in China, and the the majority of Rishi products in the world are actually come from that mushroom there.

Arthur Cole 42:05

Um that's a fascinating evolutionary trick that these have evolved. They so underneath this large bracket, um, it's producing the spores, as you say, are microscopic, this this sort of light dusting of cocoa. And the spores then um, as you say, are inversely attracted through an electrical current onto the top of it, deposited on the top of this bracket. So released from the bottom in order that they are the pores that supply the spores are protected from rain or anything like that. But this then the spores, once ready and ripe, deposit on the top of the bracket in order for what, uh insects or birds to be a dispersal.

SPEAKER_01 42:51

I think that may well be. I think also potentially what it is is that they're trying to, you know, this is a very basic form of um trying to reproduce, you know, in the same way that uh, I don't know, ferns, you know, it's very one of the very early forms of reproduction. It's you know, throw a million, a billion, in this case, probably a billion spores at it and hope something fixes. But I think that what well again it's I'm just hypothesing here, but I think possibly what's happening is that they're using that inverse negative negative charge to try and get it up and away. Right. Because by pulling it back up, you're likely to pick up some wind rather than it just falling down. Um but I mean it's what is interesting is with these, so the these sort of bracket fungi, they will release in weight about 60% of the the the total weight of the mushroom will come out in spores. And so what we were having difficulty understanding is when we were looking at um products that were coming from China, and they were using so much more mushroom than us to make their products and why their products were not stronger than ours. Um, and so we ordered I don't know 30 kilos of a few different types of mushrooms from China. And then tested them, and there was almost nothing in them. And the reason being in China the main product is Rishi spore oil. So actually, the value is in collecting the spores, not in the fruiting body. But what happens is when they put all their energy into you know creating these spores, the fruiting body is left with almost nothing in it from a compound perspective, because they've put everything into creating these spores, and that's why you know you've got to be very careful about assuming because something is made from 20 times more mushroom that there will be more in it because it's so dependent upon what the process is. And in China, the fruiting bodies are pretty much a waste product, and so um, yeah, when we when we tested it and found out that there was nothing in them, we've suddenly suddenly made sense as to why ours were coming back so much stronger than ones that should have been so much stronger than ours. If you just look at the pure weight of mushrooms that was going into it. Um and so, yeah, so that's that's that. And then out the back here we have uh beautiful view over uh Bristol. Look at that.

Arthur Cole 45:04

So we're look so we're we're higher up than Bristol, we're not that far from the airport, really, are we? And um we're looking out across blue skies, smattering of white clouds, and the metropolis of that ancient trading city of Bristol.

SPEAKER_01 45:23

Yeah, and you can see a cut, which you can't quite, there's two reservoirs just to the right there. And there in the background there, I think you can hear one of the kestrels. Yeah, it's been uh an amazing year, as we were mentioning earlier, for invertebrates and bird life up here. I mean it's extraordinary.

Arthur Cole 45:38

And here's a compost pad.

SPEAKER_01 45:40

Yeah, so this uh we make a lot of compost. Um much, much deserted. So what is interesting with this, so with the compost, we probably probably what goes in is around about a hundred tons um of our spent substrate. And because it's mainly uh wood and well it's mainly wood, beach, you land up getting if you come over I'll show you, you land up getting a very um fine uh compost at the end, which is very which doesn't have a lot of uh nutrients in it, but so it's very good as like a seed compost. Um and when I used to be an organic veg farmer, we would use this for our um seed bed, but there are if we get so hot it'll be interesting to see where the worms are. This is normally absolutely riddled with worms, and no doubt this will be the day that I can't find them.

Arthur Cole 46:38

No, I mean we've noticed with this the sun the worms have gone deep, deep down, and we've noticed the effect that this has had on all those other organisms that rely on worms to eat them. And um from everything from the birds, but also down to badgers and foxes, which you don't see during the day normally, but recently out by us, we've there we go, there's some worms. There's some worms um and we they um they're fine, they're clearly finding it more difficult to to dig for these beetles and these worms because they are they're deep down.

SPEAKER_01 47:12

Yeah, and I think birds, you know, buzzards as well, they love an easy meal. Yes, they will frequently just sit in fields looking for worms because they can't be bothered to make any effort. Right. But what is interesting at the moment, a couple of friends of mine have recently been uh attacked by buzzards. Really? Yeah, like literally last week.

Arthur Cole 47:30

Fascinating.

SPEAKER_01 47:31

Two of them. So I think they are dive bombed. Dive bombed twice, yeah. What one of them was going on a run, the other one was going on a walk. And so I think the buzzards are getting a bit big for their boots, and probably because I mean that's not necessarily normal behaviour. Um so yeah, I think I think the reality is that while certain things have been really benefiting enormously this year from the lack of rain, especially in spring, I think things potentially further up the feeding chain are finding it more difficult because on the positive, there'd be a huge amount of. I mean, I'm not sure what it's been like at the Newt, but the amount of plums this year is off the scale. Right. I've seen it in so many different places and even on the verges of stuff. So plums seem to be doing quite well. And um, you know, a lot of blackberries out now, which is not as early as last year, but still relatively early.

Arthur Cole 48:27

Oh, really early, yeah. We've been under the blackberry harvest already, and they're massive, they're like those cultivated ones you get from Holland.

SPEAKER_01 48:33

I know, I've got some of those, uh some of those in the garden actually, but this year I didn't even need them. So uh, but yeah, we're just walking out the side of the barn now, and uh yeah, and we were quite lucky to be here. We've got like uh there's a sort of 300-acre forest or wood over the back there, which is where quite a few of the strains we came from. Um so that looks mixed.

Arthur Cole 48:57

I can see the pointed heads of conifers in that woodland.

SPEAKER_01 49:00

Yeah, that one's actually more of a planted. There's actually a lot of um Japanese cedar in there. Right. Uh absolutely useless, that one for fungi. I mean, there are some on the um you know extremities of it, but it's the wood sort of over to the back. I think this is one of the interesting things about obviously with the realities of climate change, you know, we probably are going to start to need to introduce different types of well, everything, but tree in particular. And from my experience of foraging in with certain pines, it's less of an issue. With those cedars, it's a big issue. You know, the the mushrooms that have the symbiotic relationship and are already in the earth here don't necessarily form a symbiotic relationship with other types of pine that are brought in. So, for example, there's a lot of redwoods at the back end of the forest over there. And I've never found any interesting mushrooms. I've found a few trooping funnels, but that's it, and I've looked at a lot of different redwood plantations. Whereas if you go over to the Pacific Northwest, there are so many fungi that grow in symbiosis with redwoods. And so I think you know, it's another one of these, I'm sure over sort of evolutionary time or um, you know, they will get here, but certainly it hasn't happened over the last, whatever, 250 years since we brought these trees into our sort of ecosystem over here. And I'm sure you've noticed it, but certainly a lot of oaks are dropping branches and limbs at the moment, um, which is, I mean that's an ash, but uh you know, i there is definitely stresses that are being felt within our woodlands. And I think what's going to be interesting this year is last year we had an extraordinary like uh ballette harvest or sap harvest or porcini harvest in the UK. And I thought it was potentially because we'd had a relatively dry summer and then a lot of rain again. And so I think which would stress the mycelium like it does in you know in the med. Um, and I think potentially, if it does, I think we're gonna have another big one if we do get some rain, because the mycelium, fundamentally, when it fruits, that's its desire to reproduce because it's under stress. And so I think hopefully, if we do get some rain at any point in in reasonable quantities, I think we will see a lot of uh, in particular, ballets again. So here's the hoping. I would love some rain at the moment. Thanks for coming on.

Arthur Cole 51:30

Baxter from Bristol Fungarium. Here's to the future of mushrooms.

SPEAKER_01 51:36

And funky, and uh it's the future of um, you know, getting invited back to the nude.

Arthur Cole 51:53

Thank you for listening. Subscribe and tune in for more episodes from the estate every month. See you next time.