When a humongous amount of fungus among us is not a good thing …

OK – full blown mushrooms are not microbes.  But they are fungi.  And a lot of fungi are microbial.  So I am ignoring the multicellular nature of these mushrooms here – after all – nobody’s perfect.  Anyway – thought this might be of interest to those thinking about fungi in the built environment. Source: UPDATE: City …

Mycodo : A homebrew automated cultivation setup for fungiculture

One of my favorite blogs, Hackaday, recently covered a brilliantly detailed build of a mushroom cultivation control system by Kyle Gabriel. Kyle is a microbiology graduate student at Georgia State University studying the interactions of bacteria and pathogenic fungi for his research, and cultivates edible fungi for fun. The gadget monitors temperature and humidity in a sealed room under positive …

How biomass can bias high-throughput surveys of microbial communities

Puffballs are a type of fungus that is aptly named. You can ‘puff’ their ball-shaped fruiting bodies, and so many spores come out (a large one can contain 7 million), they make a visible cloud. This ostentatious and satisfying practice makes puffballs a popular choice for novice mushroom hunters tasked with bringing in specimens for …