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Edible Meat-Like Fungus Like Barbara Hambly's Slunch?
A frankly disgusting new snack may have been developed using CRISPR technology to create a fungus protein snack.
(Unaltered Fusarium venenatum)
A study released today (November 19) in the journal Trends in Biotechnology describes how scientists used the gene-editing tool CRISPR to improve a fungus’s ability to produce protein while lowering the environmental impact of its production by up to 61%—and they achieved this without inserting any foreign DNA. The modified fungus has a meatlike flavor and is easier for people to digest than the wild form.“There is a popular demand for better and more sustainable protein for food,” says corresponding author Xiao Liu of Jiangnan University in Wuxi, China. “We successfully made a fungus not only more nutritious but also more environmentally friendly by tweaking its genes.”
In her Darwath series, author Barbara Hambly describes a sort of disgusting fungus that seemingly grows everywhere, and is apparently edible. And humans shouldn't eat it. But they do. Of course.
As Rudy expected, the slunch in Graw’s fields was pretty much like the slunch everywhere else. It was almost unheard of for slunch to spread that fast, and he suspected that the patch had been there—small but certainly not unnoticeable—when Graw planted the seed.Nonetheless, he checked the place thoroughly, on the chance that a slight variation would show him something he and Ingold had missed.
It didn’t, however.
Slunch was slunch. It seemed to be vegetable, but had no seed pods or leaves or stems, and Rudy wasn’t sure about the function of the hairlike structures that held its blubbery underground portions to the soil. There was no visible reason for the vegetation all around the slunch to die, but it did.
Scroll down for more stories in the same category. (Story submitted 10/29/2025)
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