Just in time for Halloween, Korean scientists claim to have discovered a better way to grow an insect-destroying mushroom in the lab.
Their work may make it easier to study these fungi, which is important because they and the chemicals they produce may have medicinal applications for humans, as creepy as they are.
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Cordyceps is the scientific name for the fungus. Members of this genus, as well as Ophiocordyceps, a related but distinct genus, are parasitic, feeding on insects and other arthropods.
These fungi will infiltrate and often kill their hosts, but not before using them as fuel to grow their fruiting bodies (technically, this is the part of the fungi that we call the mushroom) and release new infectious spores into the world to restart the process.
Ophiocordyceps members are also known for “zombifying” their ant hosts by manipulating their behavior before death to ensure their survival.
As revolting as their way of life is, some Cordyceps members are considered food in parts of Asia. They’ve also been used in traditional Chinese medicine and, more recently, as supplements (supplements, in general, have little quality control and aren’t always harmless).
Early research has suggested that Cordyceps produces chemicals that may have health benefits, particularly a compound known as cordycepin. Some research has suggested that cordycepin may have antiviral or cancer-fighting properties.
However, because the majority of this research has come from animal or lab studies, it will take a lot more evidence in humans to confirm any potential benefits.
These experiments, as well as any eventual widespread use of Cordyceps, will necessitate a large supply of the fungi or their compounds, which will be difficult to obtain.
Though these fungi are found all over the world, they are difficult to find and harvest in the wild. There are now methods for growing them in the lab, but the current methods only produce small amounts of healthy Cordyceps or cordycepin, making them difficult to scale up.
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Chungbuk National University researchers attempted to improve on these methods, which typically use brown rice as the growth medium. They hypothesized that these mushrooms would grow better on higher protein sources, such as insects.
They also suspected that their diet would influence how big the fungi grew and how much cordycepin they produced, so they experimented with various insects.
The researchers allowed the insect nurseries to grow for two months before harvesting the Cordyceps. The team’s findings, published in Frontiers in Microbiology on Wednesday, suggest that their insect theory was correct.
“Cordyceps grown on edible insects contained approximately 100 times more cordycepin compared to Cordyceps on brown rice,” said study author Mi Kyeong Lee, a professor at Chungbuk, in a statement from Frontiers.
However, there were differences in how the insect food affected their growth, as expected. Fungi were most abundant when they fed on mealworms and silkworm pupae, for example.
They produced the most cordycepin, however, when they fed on Japanese rhinoceros beetles. The findings also show that the fat content of the insects, not their protein, predicted how much cordycepin the mushrooms produced.
The rhinoceros beetles were particularly high in a type of fat known as oleic acid, and when the researchers added oleic acid to a low-fat insect feed, the Cordyceps’ production of cordycepin increased.
“The cultivation method of Cordyceps suggested in this study will enable the production of cordycepin more effectively and economically,” Lee said.
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While these researchers may have discovered a better method of growing Cordyceps in the lab, don’t expect mass production just yet. The authors point out that producing insects on a large scale is also difficult.
So, if these strange fungi turn out to be medically useful, developing them for widespread use will be more difficult. Nonetheless, at least one research team at Oxford University is conducting early human trials of a modified version of cordycepin as a cancer drug.
