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Researchers Find Fungi Capable of Absorbing Gold and That Can Leverage Gold Mining in Space. Learn All About This Initiative from Australia.
In Boddington, in the south of the Australian city of Perth, about five years ago, an unusual story began. There, among dangerous animals and gold mines, a team of scientists from the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) discovered something rare. The discovery claims that there are some strains of fungi capable of absorbing gold from the surrounding environment and integrating it into their structure. Furthermore, by performing this mining, they managed to propagate faster than others. Seeing their potential, fungi are already in the plans for gold mining in space.
Understand How the Fungi Capable of Absorbing Gold Work
This seemed like just a curiosity; however, in recent years, the situation began to change. According to researchers, it was already known that the fungi Fusarium Oxysporum plays a fundamental role in the degradation and recycling of all kinds of organic material, such as leaves and peels, but also in the cycle of certain metals like aluminum, manganese, iron, and calcium.
According to Tsing Bohu, the scientist responsible for the project, gold is so chemically inert that this type of interaction is unusual and surprising, and it is something never seen before. Something so rare that Bohu had to publish in Nature Communications. This was the first solid evidence that there are fungi capable of absorbing gold and playing a significant role in the metal’s cycle in the Earth’s crust.
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Quickly, the mining industry turned its attention to the research. Especially in the Australian city. The island-continent is the second largest producer of gold in the world; however, the consensus among analysts is that, without new deposits, production will fall significantly in the coming years.
Initially, the industry thought that the CSIRO research could be used to find these new deposits. In Australia, it is quite common to prospect in eucalyptus forests or near termite mounds since they have a close relationship with gold. Thus, the intent was to analyze the soil in search of fungi capable of absorbing gold.
Companies Already Plan Gold Mining in Space
However, there is one more possibility. According to Eduardo Bazo in an interview, in recent years, companies have emerged that operate in what could be called metabolic mining. That is, using organisms to extract gold. This initiative may be a bit more complicated, considering that it would be much easier to identify where the gold is and extract it with industrial methods.
Nevertheless, these companies are looking a bit further ahead: gold mining in space. For years, the existence of enormous deposits of minerals in the solar system has been mentioned, and for almost the same period, humanity has fantasized about the possibility of exploring them. However, the problem lies in current technological limitations, as the fact that we are talking about processing metal in space adds to the dangers of conventional mining.
Therefore, if we use metabolic mining, the plan would be to send modified fungi capable of absorbing gold. Thus, they would be able to process this mineral in our place, making everything simpler.
Understand the Future of the Space Mining Initiative
This initiative is much less strange than it seems, and this type of approach is used for various products that we consume in our daily lives; however, applying it to the world of mining seems a bit more complex due to pure efficiency. But this should change in the future. As we write this article, various research groups are cultivating all kinds of microorganisms with the idea of cultivating gold sooner or later.
One proof of this is a surprising advance that unites microbiology and electronic art, where two scientists from the University of Michigan made a unique discovery. Kazem Kashefi, a professor of microbiology, and Adam Brown, an associate professor of electronic art, revealed the existence of bacteria capable of transforming natural compounds into 24-karat gold.
The bacteria, named Cupriadivus Metallidurans, use specialized enzymes to break down the surrounding natural compounds, releasing gold particles in a kind of elegant ballet of tiny microbes. This process, beyond its importance, has inspired scientists to explore new means of artistic expression that capture the beauty of microbiology.
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