Alex Wilkins is a writer.
The skin on the root of Ganoderma lucidum has the right qualities to work with electronic devices.
The title is "ukjent."
Mushroom skin could be used to make the base of computers and batteries.
The electronic circuits need to sit in a base called a Substrate. Unrecyclable plastic polymers are often thrown away at the end of a chip's life. 50 million tons of electronic waste is produced each year.
Martin Kaltenbrunner says that the most difficult thing to recycle is the substrates. If you have certain chips on your electronics that have a high value, you may want to recycle them.
Kaltenbrunner and his colleagues have been trying to use the skin from the mushroom Ganoderma lucidum to make an electronic device.
The mycelium, a root-like part of the fungus, is covered with a skin to protect it from foreign organisms. The skin didn't grow on any other fungi. When they dried out the skin, they found it to be flexible, a good insulator, and has a thickness similar to a sheet of paper.
Kaltenbrunner says that the skin can last for hundreds of years if it is kept away from the sun and water. It's easy to recycle because it can be easily composted in two weeks.
Kaltenbrunner and his team have shown that metal circuits on top of mycelium skin conduct the same as plastic circuits. After bending it more than 2000 times, the researchers were able to demonstrate that it could work in a basic battery for low- power devices.
The researchers hope that mushroom will be used for electronics that aren't designed to last for a long time, but first need to show it can work in current industrial electronic processes
Andrew Adamatzky is a professor at the University of the West of England in Bristol. Combining the dead mycelium skin with patches of living fungal material is being developed for possible applications as sensory skin for adaptive buildings and robots.
Science Advances was published in the journal.
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