fungi

Paul Stamets 
See pg 8 Mycelium Running: How Mushrooms Can Help Save the World for several reports by early researchers who contemplated this innovation, especially Chad A. Mirkin’s work at Department of Chemistry Institute for Nanotechnology Northwestern University: “In the May 23 Angewandte Chemie International Edition, Mirkin’s team at Northwestern University describes how it cultured spores of the fungus Aspergillus niger in the presence of 13-nm-wide gold particles that aggregated on the fibrous hyphae. Once there, the gold particles, each of which was linked to multiple short strands of DNA, could bind an additional nanoscale component bearing complementary DNA strands. This provides a means for readily mixing and matching a variety of nanoscale building blocks into ever more sophisticated structures, Mirkin says.”