[curlyQueue]

Mushrooms (and mycelium) can perform similar operations.

Some fungi can accumulate and translocate heavy metal ions and radioactive isotopes out of a system by drawing them into their mycelia network, where they eventually accumulate in the fruiting body (actual mushroom) and can be removed.

These fungi also produce many metabolites which can increase the solubility of certain metals via reduction, methylation, or dealkylation reactions with the metals.

The mycelial network can also be used as a filter to bind to certain heavy metal ions in contaminated water, where they eventually get chelated, adsorbed and entrapped in the fungal fell wall. The company VTT Technical developed a process and was able to recover 80% of the gold produced through the processing of old cell phones and other electronic waste.

[totetsu]

This is one of the core parts of world building of Miyazaki's 1980s Nausicaa manga. A world mostly covered by a vast fungus that is accumulating all the 'bad' things scattered about by the last civilization and eventually making inert sands. https://ekostoriesdotcom.files.wordpress.com/2013/08/nausica...

[starfallg]

Which humans did not understand and wish to destroy as they only saw the forest (which they named the Sea of Corruption) as toxic and threatening the existence of their civilization (both also true).

It's very pointed criticism of our own self-serving approach to environmentalism.

[johnchristopher]

I know it's old now but it's still on my to watch and to read list so you might add a spoiler tag or something.

[vmception]

Is that also featured in the anime movie?

[christkv]

Yeah it’s central to the plot

[potatochup]

What do you do with the mushrooms afterwards? (In the heavy metal case). Presumably you can't eat them, burn them... Do you just pile them up somewhere?

[nitrogen]

From watching chemistry videos on YouTube, burning them seems like the way to go. I'm guessing you'd burn them in a purpose-made furnace to melt and concentrate the metals, then put the result into safe storage.

[monadic2]

The benefit being that this reduces the energy usage required to fully separate the substances? Otherwise you could just apply this process and cut out the fungus entirely.

[KMag]

By "apply this process", you mean to put the soil or water directly in the furnace? The fungi are performing chemical concentration/separation. Depending on how hot you needed to heat the soil to get meaningful separation, you might end up damaging other properties of the soil by heating it so hot.

With water, it would have to be super contaminated for the majority of the dissolved compounds in the water to be heavy metal compounds, so distilling the water would still leave you with some mixture that you'd probably want to chemically separate. At least you wouldn't be causing any damage to the water by boiling it away, but it would be pretty energy-intensive.

[monadic2]

Thanks for explaining, I have very little knowledge of chemistry.

[nitrogen]

This is a pretty good playlist to learn the basics: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLKhDkilF5o69PqPy-oMCC...

Cool channel in general.

[autisticcurio]

So can bacteria, in this case gold. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wrJkQbKvkNo 1m 17secs long.