• Email Us: [email protected]
  • Contact Us: +1 718 874 1545
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar

Medical Market Report

  • Home
  • All Reports
  • About Us
  • Contact Us

Glowing Wood Now An Option Thanks To A Curious Fungus’s Ghostly Bioluminescence

December 3, 2024 by Deborah Bloomfield

A team of scientists have created a new kind of wood that glows in the dark thanks to the presence of a fungus that exhibits bioluminescence. It sounds like a building material fresh out of Avatar, but this ghostly glow is seen in nature as what’s known as “foxfire” – a phenomenon that inspired the team to try and work it into building materials.

Equipping wood with new functionalities is part of a wider goal to find more sustainable uses for Swiss hardwood than burning, which is where a lot of it currently goes. That goal has most recently extended to creating luminous wood in a project led by fungal researcher Francis Schwarze from Empa’s Cellulose & Wood Materials lab in St. Gallen.

Advertisement

Getting it to glow all hinged on a parasite known as ringless honey fungus, Desarmillaria tabescens, which produces luciferin. Under the right conditions, this luciferin glows as the result of enzyme activity, so Schwarze and colleagues tried to recreate the effect in wood samples that had been permeated by its fungal threads. In doing so, they borrowed a nifty trick of nature to create a material that could theoretically be applied to all kinds of things, from luminous park signs to a very ghostly home esthetic.

“Naturally luminous wood was first described around 2,400 years ago by the Greek philosopher Aristotle,” Schwarze said in a release. “Artificially produced composite materials of this kind would be interesting for many types of application.”

glowing wood in the dark emits a green glow thanks to fungus

The glowing wood in all its glory.

Image credit: Schwarze et al., Advanced Science, 2024 (CC BY 4.0)

Honey fungus isn’t the only kind that glows, there are actually over 70 species that show bioluminescence, but it’s a good option for making luminous wood as it can infiltrate it without reducing its stability. The team observed how it snuck into the balsa wood samples by degrading lignin, but that the remaining cellulose was enough to keep the balsa wood strong.

Blending the fungus and wood in this way created a biohybrid, one that’s at its most glowy when it has been incubated for three months. During that time, the balsa wood took on eight times its weight in moisture to accommodate the honey fungus’s love of all things wet. 

Advertisement

The enzyme reaction that facilitates the bioluminescence is triggered when the biohybrid fungus-wood is exposed to air, fully kicking in after about 10 hours as it emits green light with a wavelength of 560 nanometers. The glow then lasts for around 10 days, and the team hopes they can up the wow factor with some tinkering.



 “We are now optimizing the laboratory parameters in order to further increase the luminosity in the future,” added Empa researcher Giorgia Giovannini.

If things glowing that you didn’t expect to is your bag, then you’ll love the work of Finding Fluorescence – a team trying to track down animals that glow thanks to a curious trick of the light that differs from bioluminescence. They just added 15 new species to their list, and you can see some of them in all their fluorescent wonder here.

Advertisement

The study is published in Advanced Science.

Deborah Bloomfield
Deborah Bloomfield

Related posts:

  1. Amazon releases a Kindle software redesign to make navigation easier
  2. The mystery of Elon Musk’s missing gas
  3. Starseeds: Psychologists On Why Some People Think They’re Aliens Living On Earth
  4. What Are The Chances Of An Asteroid Hitting The Earth Soon?

Source Link: Glowing Wood Now An Option Thanks To A Curious Fungus’s Ghostly Bioluminescence

Filed Under: News

Primary Sidebar

  • Up To 90 Percent Of People Have This Health Condition. Just As Many Have Never Heard Of It
  • A Forgotten 19th Century “Vortex” Model Of The Atom May Help Explain Why The Universe Exists At All
  • Potential Environmental Trigger For Autism Identified, But Don’t Expect MAHA Action
  • Interstellar Object 3I/ATLAS’s Tail Appears To Have Changed Direction
  • “It Seemingly Put On An Otherworldly Show”: Watch As This Beautiful Deep-Sea Octopus Glides Gracefully Through The Ocean
  • Have You Heard About America’s Government Cheese Caves? They’ve Got Over 600 Million Kilograms Of The Stuff Stashed Away
  • There Could Be A Surprising Health Benefit To Having Gray Hair
  • New Answer To The Fermi Paradox? Cognitive Horizon Hypothesis May Explain Why Aliens Haven’t Contacted Us
  • What Happened When Patient B-19 Was Given A Brain Stimulation Device And A Button?
  • The Ice Age Squirrel That Enabled A Plant’s Resurrection 31,800 Years Later
  • The First Video Game Came Long Before Pong And Was Invented By A Manhattan Project Physicist
  • Monster Hoaxes In The Age Of AI: Seeing Isn’t Believing Anymore
  • Everyone Thought This Ancient City Was Destroyed By Plague. A New Analysis Says It Never Happened
  • The “Mind’s Eye” Doesn’t Focus Like Our Vision, Even For People Who Have One
  • Strep Throat Or Sore Throat: What’s The Difference?
  • Reptiles “Pee” Crystals, But What Are They Made Of? Scientists Wanted To Find Out
  • A Vaccine For Stomach Ulcers Might Be On The Cards, And It Could Fight Off Cancer Too
  • Only One Place On Earth Now Remains Mosquito-Free As Iceland Records First-Ever Sighting
  • This Is One Of The Only Groups Of People Outside Africa Who Had Virtually No Denisovan DNA
  • Puzzling “Transient” Lights In The 1950s Skies Focused Around Nuclear Testing Facilities, Intriguing Study Finds
  • Business
  • Health
  • News
  • Science
  • Technology
  • +1 718 874 1545
  • +91 78878 22626
  • [email protected]
Office Address
Prudour Pvt. Ltd. 420 Lexington Avenue Suite 300 New York City, NY 10170.

Powered by Prudour Network

Copyrights © 2025 · Medical Market Report. All Rights Reserved.

Go to mobile version