Giving Compass' Take:

• New research solves a nearly 50-year-old mystery of how fungi produce a large class of bioactive chemical compounds.

• What other things could fungus help with? 

• This fungus could be the answer to the plastic waste crisis. Click here to find out. 

The compounds, called prenylated indole alkaloids, were first discovered in fungi in the 1970s. Since then, they have attracted considerable interest for their wide range of potential applications as useful drugs. One compound is already used worldwide as an anti-parasitic for livestock.

Understanding how the fungi build these chemicals is essential to reproducing them and creating variants in the lab for new applications. The fungi’s genes encode enzymes, and these enzymes use very simple building blocks to perform each step to build the complex molecule.

But despite the longstanding knowledge about these compounds, researchers have not been able to tease apart the precise enzymes and reactions that the fungi use to produce them.

“But if we can actually isolate the genes involved and make these enzymes, we should be able to recreate the entire bio-assembly line in a test tube,” says Qingyun Dan, a researcher in the lab of Janet Smith at the University of Michigan’s Life Sciences Institute and a lead author of the study. “But, until now, no lab has been able to do so.”

Read the full article on how Fungi can help with new drugs by Emily Kagey at Futurity.