Chernobyl’s Strange Black Fungi Have a Superpower

Russian troops descended on the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone. The power plant was overtaken by invaders and employees were held hostage. The International Atomic Energy Agency confirmed that Russian troops have left by the end of March, and is sending experts to assess safety and security there.

People who know the site have been through a lot. She wrote in an email that on the day the plant was seized, shells were falling on her home city of Kyiv. She thought about Chornobyl, a place in Ukrainian where she and a team of scientists conducted research in the aftermath of the 1986 disaster.

The ruins of Chernobyl and the contaminated land around it have been managed and studied in the decades since the worst nuclear meltdown in history. The steel sarcophagus contains the most radioactive areas. The war could still lead to leaks or worse. Ukrainian officials report that radiation levels increased after the invasion, and the IAEA is looking into whether Russian soldiers were exposed to radiation during their occupation.

The exclusion zone is where access to visitors is heavily restricted and wildlife has adapted to it. It is one of the few places on the planet where researchers can study the effects of radiation on nature, and it has yielded many discoveries.

The world needs to be tasted!

Five years after the disaster, a jet-black fungus was found on the inside of the reactor. A group of microbiologists from the Kyiv Institute of Microbiology and Virology began visiting the area regularly.

The first impressions from my personal trips to the Chernobyl zone were very sad. The closed exclusion zone gradually began to look like a nature reserve as years went by. The scientists walked with a dosimeter and it reminded them that radiation was nearby.

Tugai wrote that it was only possible to be directly there for a short time.

In the 1990s, Tugai and a team led by Nelli Zhdanova found more than 200 species of fungi at the site, including jet-black fungi with melanin, a pigment that influences the color of human and animal hair, skin, and other things. Scientists at the Institute for Nuclear Research of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine began to study the ability of the fungi to thrive in extreme radiation.

Tugai's team hypothesised that the melanized fungi might be growing well because of the way it interacts with radiation. Ionizing radiation altered the structure of melanin molecule in a way that encouraged those fungi to grow faster than identical samples that were not exposed to radiation, according to their research. The more melanin the fungi expressed, the closer the source of radiation was. The black fungi were growing in spite of the radiation, but they were changing and growing because of it.

Tugai, Zhdanova, and John Dighton of Rutgers University conducted additional research and found that the cells of the skin were drawn to radiation. Positive radiotropism is a phenomenon in which organisms can sense radioactivity and grow towards the source.

Some samples of their own were acquired by an American team of researchers. The Ukrainian team concluded that the fungi had a unique ability to thrive with radiation. The effect was that they would grow faster if they didn't have melanin.

The implications of this research could be very big. In 2016 NASA and SpaceX sent melanized fungi into space to see if it mitigated radiation. According to a study published in 2020 that is currently undergoing peer review, the fungi could cut radiation levels in space by about two percent, which could potentially affect the annual dose-equivalent of the radiation environment on the surface of Mars.

There is a critical role for melanized fungi here on our planet. Dadachova's research suggests that the unique relationship between fungi, melanin, and radiation could provide new insights into ways to reduce radiation and energy generated in a warming climate. It could help in the case of another nuclear disaster. Concerns about the fate of Chernobyl could still lead to unique solutions.

The radioactive soil around the reactor continues to grow with the growth of fungi. While most of the soil had been cleared of the majority of radiation, no one touched the soil on the territory of the cemetery. Birds fly and sing in the branches of the new trees that have grown over the years. The webs of fungi pass signals through roots to transform them into something new.