high fungi farm

15/02/2026

Reishi

04/01/2026

Lions

02/01/2026

15/12/2025

Hi Folks! Interesting reading comparing mushroom mycelium vs mushroom fruit body extracts. 🍄

Repost from Elan Sudberg:

The team behind Alkemist Labs long time friend and client, Paul Stamets / Host Defense just posted a mechanistic paper on Lion’s Mane (Hericium erinaceus) mycelium and how it behaves in human immune cells under stress. Not a mouse, not a marketing deck. Actual PBMCs, transcriptomics, and cytokine readouts.

Two things jumped out at me:

1) Calm under challenge.
When immune cells were hit with an inflammatory LPS challenge, the Lion’s Mane mycelium prep consistently reduced classic stress cytokines like IL-1β, TNF-α, and IL-8, while keeping baseline cytokines low. In other words: modulate, don’t light the place on fire.

2) Tissue type matters. A lot.
They compared the mycelium to a β-glucan-enriched fruiting-body extract. Under the same challenge, the fruiting-body extract nearly doubled IL-1β, while the mycelium drove it down. Same species, different material, different immune outcome. That’s a big deal for anyone who thinks “Lion’s Mane is Lion’s Mane.”

Also notable: the mycelium showed stronger antioxidant and iron-chelating activity than the fruiting-body extract in this setup.

Important disclaimer so nobody gets weird: this is a preprint and still under peer review. But the direction is clear enough to be interesting, and it reinforces something I’ve been saying for years:

You don’t get to assume bioactivity from a species name. You test the actual preparation.

https://www.preprints.org/manuscript/202511.1990

13/12/2025

11/12/2025

11/12/2025

23/11/2025

In the heart of the Amazon rainforest, scientists discovered something extraordinary — a fungus that eats plastic.

🧪 Pestalotiopsis microspora is not your typical fungus. It can survive entirely on polyurethane, one of the most common (and most persistent) types of plastic — and it does so even in oxygen-free environments, like buried landfills.

This remarkable ability makes it a natural recycler, capable of doing what human-made systems still struggle with: breaking down plastic waste efficiently and sustainably.

🌿 Imagine a world where discarded plastic bottles don’t last centuries — but are decomposed in weeks, thanks to a microscopic ally hidden in the forest floor.

Researchers now hope to harness this species for bioremediation — cleaning up polluted soils, plastic-infested coastlines, and even our oceans.

♻️ Nature already holds the solutions. We just have to learn from it.