The story begins more than five years ago in Boddington, south of the Australian city of Perth. There, among murderous animals and gold mines, a team of researchers from the Australian CSIRO discovered something truly rare: that certain fungus strains Fusarium oxysporum Not only could they extract gold from its surroundings and integrate it into their structure, but in doing so they managed to spread faster than the rest.
It seemed a curiosity without more, but in recent years the situation has begun to change.
But, a moment, why is something so “weird”? Good question. After all, we know of good ink that fungi “play an essential role in the degradation and recycling of all types of organic material (such as leaves or bark), but also in the cycle of certain metals such as aluminum, iron, manganese and calcium.” Why would it be different with gold?
Because, as Tsing Bohu explained, a researcher in charge of the project, “Gold is so inactive (chemically speaking) that this type of interactions is unusual and surprising, he had to see him to believe it.” And he saw it.
In fact, he published it in Nature Communications. It was the first solid evidence that fungi could have a relevant role in the gold cycle in the earth’s crust.
The “mushroom” of golden eggs. Quickly the mining industry put his eyes on the investigation. Especially right there, in Australia. The Continent Island is the second largest gold producer in the world, but the consensus among analysts is that without new deposits the production was going to fall (and much) in a short time.
Initially, the industry thought that CSIRO’s investigation could serve to locate these new deposits. As we explained years ago, in Australia it is relatively common to make prospects in forests of the Aucaliptos family or near thermal areas because they have a close relationship with the precious metal. Why not analyze the land in search of those strains of Fusarium oxysporum?
But there is one more possibility. As Eduardo Bazo explained to Eugenio Fernández in a very interesting interview, in recent years there have been companies that work on what we could call “metabolic mining.” That is, in using organisms to extract gold.
“And what do you want that?” You could ask. “Isn’t it easier to identify where gold is and extract with industrial methods?” Yes, here on earth, yes. But these companies look a little further: in space mining.
For years we have talked about the existence of huge mineral deposits in the solar system and, for almost the same, we have fantasized to be able to exploit them. The problem is that, beyond the current technological limitations, to the danger of normal mining, the fact that we talk about processing metal in space is added.
But and if we use ‘metabolic mining’? The idea of sending modified strains of these fungi (or other microorganisms) to process the mineral for us, everything would become easier. I don’t know if more viable, but simpler.
It is much less rare than it seems (this type of approaches we use for innumerable products that we usually use), however to take it to the world of mining seems a bit more complex due to pure efficiency. However, that’s ‘now’.
While I write (and while the era of cheap materials is over) several research groups are cultivating all kinds of microorganisms with the idea of being able to grow gold sooner rather than later.
Image | Dominik vanyi | Jaap Straydo
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