Hungry fungi chomp on radiation

http://www.nature.com/news/2007/070521/full/news070521-5.html

Published online 23 May 2007 | Nature | doi:10.1038/news070521-5
Corrected online: 4 June 2007
Heidi Ledford

From plastic to asbestos, cardboard to jet fuel, fungi will eat just about anything. Now researchers have found another dish in the fungal diet: radiation. Not radioactive compounds, which have long been known to be on the menu — radiation itself.

Ekaterina Dadachova and her colleagues at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York have discovered that some fungi can use a molecule called melanin, a pigment also found in human skin, to harvest the energy from radiation and use it for growth.

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Dadachova's team found that exposure to radiation caused the fungal melanin molecule to change shape so that it was four times better at carrying out a common metabolic chemical reaction. Fungal strains without melanin generally did not grow faster in response to radiation.

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