Thread by @annethegnome

FUNGUS IN SPACE!!! 🍄🚀

Equal parts cosmic horror and nature being metal, let's talk about the lichen that grew on the OUTSIDE of the International Space Station!

Get your tea and curl up, because I PROMISE you wanna hear about these fungal cosmonauts 🧑‍🚀
🧵

Starting at the beginning:

In 1988, we first learned that fungi could survive in outer space in a VERY DRAMATIC WAY. Astronauts on the Russian space station Mir saw a strange film spreading across the OUTSIDE of a window.

This feels like something from the Magnus Archives 😨

The substance KEPT GROWING, destroying the window's titanium-quartz surface and GETTING INTO THE SPACE STATION!

Listen, I know you're thinking 👽aliens👽, but it was the opposite: these were just piggyback astronauts who'd hitched a ride from Earth.

Yup, turns out that 6 kinds of fungi had managed to join the team uninvited, and they quickly adapted to their new environment.

While this might sound creepy, it was SO EXCITING for astrobiologists! We had PROOF that fungi could THRIVE in space!

Nowadays, there are pretty robust anti-fungal measures to keep our sporing friends from joining space crews uninvited. Even if they're super cool, typically we want to keep our space missions sterile.

UNLESS! (now you say it)

The European Space Agency is heading up the The Lichens and Fungi Experiment (LIFE ... god I love nerds), specifically testing how fungi behave in space and in Mars-like conditions.

Around 2012, the lichen 'Xanthoria elegans' (commonly known as the Elegant Sunburst Lichen!) was attached to exterior of the International Space Station for 18 months AND SURVIVED!

With no water, no air, extreme temperatures and constant bombardment with radiation!

The BEST PART is that the lichen didn't go into stasis, but kept right on photosynthesizing. Just chomp 🌞chomp 🌞 chompin' 🌞 on that unfiltered sunlight.

Lichen might be the TOUGHEST organism on earth. But what even is 💚lichen💚?

Lichen is actually a composite organism, meaning that it’s actually a plant (algae) or bacteria (cyanobacteria) who has joined forces with a fungus (or a few fungi).
Lichen are classified as fungus, but have many of the benefits of being a plant AND a fungus.

Fungi can’t make their own food, but plants do it all the time through photosynthesis. And plants struggle to gather nutrients from their environment, but fungi kicks ass at that. So they teamed up and formed a whole kind of super fungus!

Fun fact, a lot of things we call moss are actually lichen ("reindeer moss", "Iceland moss"). Also peat moss isn’t moss, but at least that one really is a plant. For more MOSS FACTS read Gathering Moss by Robin Wall Kimmerer. BUT BACK TO LICHEN!

Lichen are a big deal on earth. First off, they’re GORGEOUS but also they cover 6–8% of Earth's land surface! We know of 20000 species but there are likely MANY MANY MORE.
We estimate that we’ve only discovered 10% of fungi, as opposed to 85% of plants.

Those space lichen were outside for 18 months, and about 35% survived. And if that seems low, I want to remind you that the rate for animals and plants is 0% --

BUT THERE IS MORE! There was a sub-group that was in "mars-like conditions" and 70% of THOSE survived!

Fungi are INCREDIBLE at dealing with radiation. Lichen can survive 12000x the dose that would kill a human.

We also think some fungi (including mushrooms) might EAT radiation through ☢️radiosynthesis☢️. Let's take a quick detour to the Chernobyl disaster site.

In 1991, remotely piloted robots discovered a black fungus growing INSIDE one the Chernobyl reactors. The black colour was caused by melanin, the same pigment in human skin, eyes and hair than helps US withstand radiation!

Further research revealed that these fungi grew faster when exposed to more radiation. They weren't growing DESPITE the radiation, but BECAUSE of it!

We found that cryptococcus neoformans was so good at it, we got curious if we could use this to our own advantage.

Citation:
Dadachova E, Casadevall A. Ionizing radiation: how fungi cope, adapt, and exploit with the help of melanin. Curr Opin Microbiol. 2008 Dec;11(6):525-31. doi: 10.1016/j.mib.2008.09.013. Epub 2008 Oct 24. PMID: 18848901; PMCID: PMC2677413.

BACK TO SPACE!
NASA sent these melanized fungi to space in 2016, and determined that the fungi could cut radiation levels on the ISS by ~2%!
They EAT the radiation and that could be really important for other organisms at risk of radiation sickness.

Next step? MUSHROOM HOUSES ON MARS!

NASA is investigating myco-architecture. Imagine human explorers bringing dormant fungi, adding water on arrival allowing the fungi to grow around a framework into a fully functional human habitat!

It's like a chia pet house!

Update: we put Maritime Sunburst Lichen in simulated mars conditions, and it's live laugh lovin' it.

"Results indicated that the production of antioxidants, along with the occurrence of photoprotection mechanisms, guarantee X. parietina survivability in Mars-like environment."

Citations:
Maritime Sunburst lichen
Mushrooms houses on mars

Fungi on the ISS
pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38108922/
nasa.gov/centers-and-fa…
researchgate.net/publication/26…

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AND NEXT TIME YOU SEE LICHEN, tell it "damn, well done," because it DESERVES it.

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