All forms of life on this planet are highly adaptive given a significant selective pressure and adequate resources. Symbiosis in most literature is taken as fact; the fields of environment studies and ecology deal solely with interspecies relationships that create a unique means of survival for both, each species creates a niche in an environment and fills another created by a complimenting species.
Fungi are a highly specialised kingdom. With very low food requirements, a high resilience to disease, a short reproductive cycle that is easily manipulated and a range of secondary metabolites as a means of interacting with their environment, fungi are high desirable as a niche creating group to humans.
Fungi and humans share a common pathogenic species that lives in symbiosis with us both; bacteria. Interestingly, many of the same bacteria that cause disease or death in humans do the same in fungi. This has led to a harvesting of fungi for the antibacterial secondary metabolites they produce. This is a widely accepted practice, but lacks a key strength; adaptability.
In the Ukraine bacteriophage are harvested from hospital drainage systems and stored in libraries. They are used as antibiotics in hospitals, where they actively feed on the bacteria that grows there. This premise is proved to work, though there are many reservations about its widespread use in other countries.
Given fungi's ability to reproduce quickly and spread DNA among a colony, a full colony adaptation to a pathogen can occur in as little as one generation. If this increased efficacy of pathogenic resistance could be first acquired in fungi, then passed to humans through secondary metabolite harvesting the results could be a fungal panacea; its secondary metabolites able to kill any bacteria its colony previously had contacted.
Given a bacterial library, an environment tailored for efficient fungal propagation and later stringent testing of the metabolic content of the resistant fungi produced, the results could mean a new form of antibiotic farming, where a cure is not searched for, but rather asked for with an offering of the offending pathogen.
Aim: Test the ability of fungi to adapt to various human pathogens native to Victoria.
Method:
The fungi used will vary based on adaptability of varying species.
A range of varying bacteria are harvested from culture.
Inoculations of bacterial colonies in suspension are prepared and added to the fungal food source at a stage of fungal development prior to sporing.
A subsequent test will be done on the f1 generation, with a tenfold increase in bacterial exposure. The results will be monitored closely and if pathogenesis is notably marked, a further tenfold increase will be used to inoculate the f2 generation, this will continue until there is no noted pathogenesis after exposure to the bacterium of interest.
Subsequent studies will be designed to encourage breeding between bacteria resistant fungi to optimise the spread of resistance genes.
//I'll mostly add methodology as I find what works best, and results when they become available.
Then discuss and get peer reviewed by farmer Dan.
No comments:
Post a Comment