(((Boy, that one's freaky.)))
Link: Technology Review: Eating Radiation: A New Form of Energy?.
It sounds like something out of a comic book, although scientists already know that fungi will eat asbestos, jet fuel, and plastic. It has also been shown to decompose hot graphite in the ruins of the Chernobyl power plant, which melted down in 1986. The plant's release of large amounts of radiation appears to have attracted black hordes of fungi. But how does it work?
According to Ekaterina Dadachova and her colleagues at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, in New York City, the fungi Cryptococcus neoformans and two other species use melanin, also a pigment found in human skin, to transform radiation into energy to use as food for growth. Researchers believe that melanin is present to protect fungi from stress, such as radiation, and that certain species use this molecule for metabolic reactions. Dadachova's lab discovered that exposure to radiation caused the melanin in these species to change shape, increasing its ability to impact metabolism and growth. The results appear in Public Library of Science (PLoS).
Dadachova tells me in an e-mail that the most amazing aspect of the finding is that this process is an alternative to photosynthesis, "with melanin playing the role of chlorophyll and ionizing radiation; the role of visible light."...
