The future of fungi

0:00This is Stanford's The Future of Everything, and I'm your host, Russ Altman. Since we started this podcast eight years ago, it's become an archive of the amazing and impactful work done by my colleagues at Stanford University. In a time when the sheer volume of information available to us can make our heads spin and make it hard to determine what's accurate, I'm proud to be able to bring you experts in law, medicine, engineering, technology, and much more.

0:27Vayu Hill-Maini:One of the really interesting things about fungi and molds and mushrooms is that they are nature's recyclers. They're basically nature's biological recycling machines. They grow on what we consider waste. Wood, leaves, you know, they basically will just chomp that up and eat it and digest it. So our idea here, I think, at the core of the lab is how can we tap into that natural ability to eat food waste, agricultural waste, maybe even plastics. and then use the fungi to then convert that into something useful.

1:05This is Stanford Engineering's The Future of Everything, and I'm your host, Russ Altman. If this podcast brings you value, then consider rating and reviewing it to show your appreciation and to give us some feedback. We'd love to get a 5.0 if we deserve it, and thank you very much for giving us your thoughts. Today, Vayu Hilmaine will tell us that mushrooms and molds can be the source of nutrition, new medications, as well as new materials. It's the future of food. A quick reminder that at the end of my conversation with Vayu, we'll do the segment, The Future in a Minute, where I ask him some rapid-fire questions.

1:40He'll give me some rapid answers, and that'll be The Future in a Minute. Again, before we get started, remember to rate and review the show. It really does help.

1:55You know, when we think about molds and mushrooms, there's a couple of things we can think about. We can think about our favorite, most delicious mushrooms that we love added to our food. We saute in olive oil. We add some garlic, whatever. It can be very delicious. But we also think about molds and mushrooms that grow on dead stuff. We know that there's kind of gross stuff on old fruit. We see outside sometimes a piece of wood that's moist, has fungus and mushrooms growing all over it. Eh, not so attractive. But we've been using foods like mushrooms forever, for thousands of years. And in other cases, like plants and vegetables and animals, there's a long history of husbandry, where we slowly and selectively breed them to make the corn bigger and more tasty, to make the beef or the pigs better for eating if you're a meat eater and things like that.

2:48Well, it turns out that for mushrooms, they really look about the same that they looked thousands of years ago. They haven't changed that much. And yet they're a great and important source of food. They have protein. They have vitamins. They have carbohydrates. And they have molecules like antioxidants. So they're very valuable. Well, Vyo Hilmany is both a professor of bioengineering and a Michelin star chef who is very interested in engineering these molds and mushrooms to become delicious foods. But more than that, he thinks that they should also be a source of new medications. There's a long history of mushrooms providing us some of our medications and a source of new and potentially colorful materials.

3:33Vyo, thanks so much for joining us. And to start out, you've been a chef, a pretty darn good chef. And now you're a professor of bioengineering at a research university. How did that happen?

3:45Vayu Hill-Maini:Sometimes I wonder how that happened myself, too. I think, you know, looking back at the journey, it's taken its own twists and turns. But the sort of story is that I grew up in Sweden, in Stockholm, in a multicultural home. And I fell in love with cooking when I was really young. And so for a long time, I kind of thought that's what I wanted to do in life, to cook and to share food and to explore culture through flavor. And I originally moved to the US from Sweden to pursue that dream, working in restaurants, working in food. And it was during these experiences in the kitchen that I actually discovered science.

4:21Vayu Hill-Maini:Not only because science is cool, inspiring and awesome, but because for me, it provided a new lens through which I could look at food. You know, there's engineering, there's physics, there's chemistry, there's biology in the kitchen, in the food we eat. And by applying this, we could actually make food better, more interesting, more sustainable. And so it's kind of that realization that then led me to go into do a PhD to do research and sort of continue on that journey. And it's always been kind of connected to my interest in food. So I would say that now as a professor, I'm still cooking, but it's in a different way, You know, with different kinds of reagents and ingredients in a different setting.

5:01Vayu Hill-Maini:But that's sort of the journey. I've always wanted to find ways to connect food and science. That's fabulous. And we're definitely going to talk about both food and science. But it's just really interesting to me because as I understand it, you know, whenever we hire at a university a new faculty member, they get a laboratory and we make the hoods and we make the benches, you know, so for the pipettes and all the equipment. My understanding is that as part of your build out of your lab, there's not just all of the lab benches and stuff, but there's also a kitchen. Exactly. I mean, that's been one of my dreams since I was very young.

5:36Vayu Hill-Maini:Kind of how can we bring these worlds together? You know, they traditionally kind of live pretty separately. You have the high end restaurants pushing the frontiers of gastronomy and cooking. And on the other hand, you have labs discovering the inner workings of the universe. But I think there's a magic that can happen when those worlds come together. and you know as i was thinking about what i wanted to do and in my life and you know always being kind of confused about how these two identities and interests could fit together um i found that you know stanford was really exciting and inspiring because they were like they sort of got it and they said you know what i think this is possible we can build a kitchen we can build a lab and we can build them together um and you know the the lab is sort of finished The kitchen is so soon finished.

6:18Vayu Hill-Maini:And yeah, it's I mean, it's a dream come true. I can't wait to see what comes from it. It really is exciting. And two logistical questions. I'm assuming that they have to separate the kitchen from the lab for safety reasons. Exactly. That's correct. Secondly, selfishly, what about a little cafe or a table where I can sit down and try your stuff? You're going to have to talk to Stanford about that. Just kidding. We will have as part of our kitchen, hopefully outreach and engagement with the Stanford community and also the public as a way to kind of bring people in and teach them and have them taste what the future of food could look like.

7:01Vayu Hill-Maini:And so part of the kitchen sort of design is to have a little sort of area where people can sit and interact and taste as things are being prepared. And of course, as part of our research, we're also going to run sensory trials as we develop something new with new ingredients or new flavors. We want to see what do people think and collect data on that to inform how we make them better. So I think that will be an awesome opportunity for people to get involved and see what we're up to. Let me know when reservations open up and I'll get an open table. I will do it. So getting into the science a little bit, I know that and I don't want to, of course, I don't want to limit what we talk about.

7:39But one of the main areas of focus in your work has been fungi, mushrooms and other things and molds. And so before we get into what the actual science is and what you're doing, I think it would be useful for you to explain to people what are mushrooms and fungi and molds like. We all see them. We kind of generally know what they are. But biologically, as an academic, tell me about the lifestyle and how they grow and what their history of, maybe a little bit of their history of use as foods.

8:10Vayu Hill-Maini:That's a great question. I think for a lot of people in the world, maybe in this part of the world, we're in the U.S., people might be a little bit like, oh, fungi. Like, ooh, I don't know about that. Other cultures, people are really excited and embracing because there's a long history of using and consuming and interacting with that. But basically, you know, fungi are a kingdom in the tree of life. You know, fungi encompass the yeasts like Saccharomyces cerevisiae used to make bread and beer. That's probably the most familiar fungus of them all. And valuable. What do you say? And valuable. I mean, beer and bread, you know, we could stop right there.

8:46Vayu Hill-Maini:Exactly. But I think, you know, Saccharomyces is awesome. It's cool. It makes tasty things. I'm really excited about another group of fungi called the filamentous fungi. the fungi they grow as multicellular filaments so instead of a single cell like a yeast they grow as this sort of network and tissue called mycelium and that includes both molds sort of the fluffy stuff you might see growing on a you know spoiled fruit in your fridge as well as mushrooms the things you might see in the forest growing or at the grocery store and these fungi these filamentous fungi have a really interesting history they've also been used for food production for thousands of years as well blue cheese or camembert or brie are only made possible because of filamentous fungi a mold called penicillium soy sauce miso sake only made possible because of a mold called aspergillus so even though we might not know that they're ubiquitous in our lives and they've been the source of many important innovations that have really had an impact on humanity.

9:50Vayu Hill-Maini:For example, penicillin came from penicillin molds. Statins, the cholesterol-lowering drugs, also came from filamentous fungi. Psychedelics like psilocybin come from mushrooms. So I would say in addition to their use as food, they've been very important commercially and had a very powerful impact on our society. Yeah, so this is great. Thank you. So that was a beautiful, almost as if you'd done it before uh summary uh of of the role of these foods so let me ask a few detailed questions um have funguses or fungi fungi uh have they been domesticated and what i mean by that is for many of the foods that we eat there's a long history of husbandry uh forget about the bioengineering within the lab just people who are like nudging the things to become bigger to become more tasty is this something that has happened to these fungi over time yes it has and it's interesting if you look at sort of molds versus mushrooms so in the case of molds like penicillium used to make blue cheese or aspergillus used to make soy sauce you actually see that over time over thousands of years of history there's been significant genetic changes basically they've been tamed maybe in the wild they're competing for nutrients and they're trying to kill off everything around them but as humans have sort of taken them under their care they become more friendly and we've changed their flavors their textures their appearance all by kind of modifying the dna through this sort of experimental evolution process almost yes kind of like selection like you get a big cow you want a big cow you let that cow reproduce or you get a big piece of corn examples of that like we have discovered for example a fungus called neurospora intermedia that was domesticated to turn waste into food people grow it on soy milk waste or other kind of sources historically in indonesia and through that process it was domesticated to basically say let me grow on stuff that humans normally don't eat and turn it into food so there's a lot of cool examples and i think we're just scratching the surface i do want to say though when it comes to mushrooms the things that you see in the grocery stores that's a major i would say food crop right you have plants and you have mushrooms we cultivate them we grow them plants have undergone dramatic changes in their morphology their shape mushrooms are very similar to how they used to be back in the day maybe the biggest noticeable difference is the brown mushroom turned white you know but there's a lot of kind of i think maybe we don't understand enough but i also don't think we have domesticated them quite as much as we have with the other fungi yes because we we see these pictures for example of corn and the natural corn you know five kernels all kind of gnarly looking and then we buy the corn at the store and it's beautiful everything's in array it's yellow it's sweet um but what i'm hearing you say is that has not happened yet and and they stay tuned it has not happened yet for for the mushrooms yeah is there a reason at all have did farmers try to do this because farmers you know in my experience farmers over the year over the years have been incredibly in like you know innovative in you know they get money have they tried and have these mushrooms resisted kind of domestication or or what why why do they look the same it's a good question actually i mean sometimes we don't capture the attempts we only see the outcome of the process right so it's hard for me to sort of say like to what extent people try i will say that like mushrooms i think maybe are a little bit more more mysterious than plants you know and and and maybe sort of our handle on their biology is is a little bit more limited i think you know with the long history of plant science as well as sort of the advances that we've seen in molecular biology and genetics i think there's there's been a lot more uh sort of success cases and and and outcomes there that we can look to i think with mushrooms you know like there hasn't maybe been as much research and and and sort of resources and they are complex in a different way they you know with as far as the sexual mating and and how to figure that out and stuff so there has been breeding i would say but but not to the same extent where you fundamentally have change you know how it looks or tastes or how it behaves great and i know and we're going to get to this that one of your major scientific goals is to create a toolbox that will allow you to make it easier to engineer mushrooms so to speak and we're going to get to that but before that i think maybe my last question in terms of the foundations is for people are very aware now of the of the value the nutrition value of various things we know that like grains are good and nuts are good and other things maybe not so good.

14:39Tell us about mushrooms as a food source as they exist now. Are they a high source of protein or carbs or vitamins? I know that there are a lot of different ones.

14:48Vayu Hill-Maini:I'm asking you to summarize the landscape a little bit. I think one of the things that people might not appreciate is that fungi are more closely related to us than plants are, which means that they have more similar nutritional requirements and profiles. A lot of fungi contain all the essential amino acids which some plants actually lack and they have sort of maybe more similar proteins digestibility and stuff compared to maybe plants and on top of that you know fungi provide fiber they also provide vitamins like b vitamins and then i think finally potentially beneficial molecules they're not sort of vitamins they're more like beneficial molecules with sort of health benefits.

15:35Vayu Hill-Maini:One of them is called ergothionine, which is a very powerful antioxidant that humans have actually evolved a receptor to take up specifically. And so there's some examples of, you know, sort of medicinal sort of therapeutic potentially benefits of fungi that it's an additional layer maybe of what they can provide in the diet. One of the things though, is that, you know, mushrooms in particular are full of water so even though they can be a good source of protein you know a lot of what you're eating is water if you're growing i know this when i saute them in my olive oil every morning um but it is uh you know i think it is it's interesting as people might not appreciate that but they do they come with with a lot of significant nutrients good amino acids and i think maybe most importantly they're delicious great okay so now thank you so much now let's get to your research program.

16:26Tell us the kinds of things that you're doing in the lab, either that you have done, or if you can tell us about things that are on the way, what drives the lab? What are the experimental approaches? Tell us about the science of engineering molds and mushrooms.

16:41Vayu Hill-Maini:Yeah. So, I mean, we're really motivated by addressing challenges in sustainability. You know, we have a lot of challenges in the food system and manufacturing and a lot of sort of areas of our lives that we think that biology could play a role to address. And we're very excited about fungi. Fungi, I want to say, there are bad stuff they do. They cause disease to crops, and they can also cause disease to humans in some cases. But we're excited about the good stuff that fungi can do and what they can give us. And really kind of try to tap into that potential to address sustainability challenges.

17:16Vayu Hill-Maini:One of the really interesting things about fungi and the molds and mushrooms is that they are nature's recyclers. They're basically nature's biological recycling machines. They grow on what we consider waste, wood, leaves. They basically will just chomp that up and eat it and digest it. So our idea here, I think at the core of the lab is how can we tap into that natural ability to eat food waste, agricultural waste, maybe even plastics. and then use the fungi to then convert that into something useful. Food is a big focus of our lab, but also maybe materials or chemicals or other things through the power of bioengineering and genetics.

17:57Vayu Hill-Maini:You know, I think really it's interesting that I think it gives us an opportunity to work with biology rather than against it. We're not trying to over-engineer this bacterium to grow on waste. And, you know, it already does this. We just have to kind of fine-tune it towards the outputs we're excited about. So I would say that's sort of a general framework that involves and informs what we're trying to do in the lab. When we think about the food aspect, I'm sure you've dealt with this. How do you convince your people? Now I'm talking to you as a chef. How do you convince people to eat stuff that grew on waste?

18:34Even though they might know it for normal fungi and mushrooms, they might conveniently be able to forget it.

18:42Vayu Hill-Maini:But how do you have that conversation? That's a really great point. And I think it kind of brings up a broader point, which is, you know, as we think about food and creating new foods and tapping into this amazing ability for food to, you know, food waste, upcycling, conversion, it's not just technology, right? Like food really touches on our psychology, our emotions, our history, our tradition. So that is sort of the inspiration about having a kitchen so that we can have those conversations. And we particularly work very closely with chefs to try to think about what is the language we have to create around this?

19:14Vayu Hill-Maini:How do we sort of ask and inform people? How do we take the temperature of what's going on? So I think sometimes, you know, as scientists, we put our blinders on and we create something really cool technology. And then when it comes out in the world, there's all these sort of unanticipated reactions and consequences. GMO or genetic modification of plants is one example of that. Right. I think by involving kind of other stakeholders in the scientific process, we hope to be able to get to those questions. And, you know, I wouldn't say that I have an obvious answer today. But I think that if it's delicious and people can sort of say, wow, I want to have more, creating desire is a really good starting point.

19:54Vayu Hill-Maini:You know, people are not going to buy it because it's green, you know, okay, sustainable and it saves this many, you know, acres of land or whatever. I think we have to connect to something deep and emotional. And again, that's where chefs can really, really help us. This is The Future of Everything with Russ Altman. We'll have more with Vayu Hilmanyi next.

20:22Welcome back to The Future of Everything. I'm Russ Altman, and I'm speaking with Vayu Hilmanyi from Stanford University. In the first segment, we did a romp through molds and mushrooms, what they are biologically what the history of eating them and using them for useful purposes is and a little bit about how they're starting to be engineered gently to create new foods. In this segment, I want to push that a little harder and find what kind of things is Vayu doing to these mushrooms and molds to make them more delicious and more edible. Don't forget, at the end of this segment I'll have the future in a minute where I'll ask Vayu some quick questions he'll give me some quick answers it'll be about a minute.

21:01Vayu Hill-Maini:What kind of things can you build in the lab? You used the word delicious right before the end of the first segment. What kind of delicious things are you imagining coming out of your lab? Well, that's a great question. And I think that's where genetics and bioengineering can really come in and play a role. I talked about how over centuries, these fungi were domesticated. We changed their DNA and we sort of specialized them for the uses that we value, cheese, miso, soy sauce, you name it. That took thousands of years. And I think as we think about the future of food and the food system, we don't have thousands of years.

21:38Vayu Hill-Maini:It's an urgent challenge. It's 30 % of all global emissions. So we need to act now. And with a technology like CRISPR-Cas9, we can make similar modifications or domesticate the fungi in the laboratory now. So that's kind of what we're thinking about. One example is how do we improve flavor? A very simple case there could be sometimes the fungi could make some off flavors you know maybe they're a little sour or maybe they have sort of aromas that people find you know okay but off-putting by simply knocking out a single gene you could actually create a clean slate that's an example otherwise we could also imagine enhancing nutrition trying to get more protein content so if the protein content is a limiting factor how could you increase it to make it higher or adding other vitamins and nutrients, for example, improving the content of vitamin A in some of the fungi that we work with to make them really, really boosted superfoods.

22:30Vayu Hill-Maini:So I think that when people hear genetic modification, they might think about, oh, I'm going to take a gene from a frog and putting into a fungus and it's this alien thing. I think sometimes it's more about looking at what's already within the genome, in the DNA and tinkering and sort of modifying it the way that we have for thousands of years, but now with contemporary tools. Yeah, you said this before and it struck me that your approach is a little bit more not like come in and change everything, but like little tweaks, little adjustments, like maybe one of these small chemicals is slightly unfavorable for the taste profile.

23:05And so let's just either reduce it or eliminate it or whatever. And so that's a very attractive approach because then at the end of the day, when you give the story of what you did to this, it's a nuanced kind of gentle engineering. Exactly. My sense is that That would sell, and forgive my use of the word sell, that would sell better to the customers who are deciding, do I want to give this a try?

23:28Vayu Hill-Maini:Exactly. Then you can think about what can we make with it. We're thinking about the nutritionally enhanced mushrooms that are better for you and grow faster and are more economical. We're also taking some of the molds and fermenting waste from the brewing industry into a delicious new cheese or a burger or a salami. So we are discovering also, I think, from the culinary side, what are the new uses? And where does the flavor profile make sense? And how do we then go back into the lab to try to enhance and tinker with it? We call it the DBTL cycle. Design, build, taste, learn. I love it. Going back and forth between the kitchen and the lab.

24:06So even though you're a somewhat accomplished chef, I know that you also host chefs at your lab as part of what you just described. kind of thinking about like what needs to be fixed, what is possible that we don't have. So tell me about how you bring in chefs.

24:22Vayu Hill-Maini:I mean, it's just been incredible. You know, this year we've had the pleasure of hosting a chef in residence. You know, a lot of people know about artists in residence. You have an artist immersing themselves in the environment. Stanford has a long history of this through the Denning Visiting Artist Program. And we thought, could we have a chef? and it was amazing because the office of the vice president of the arts and the door school of sustainability were really excited and provided funding and we've had a chef from a two mission star restaurant in spain called mugaritz in the fall for three weeks and in the spring for three weeks at the university at the university in our laboratory talking to the phd students postdocs learning about what's going on but also teaching our campus about their approach to flavor and creativity.

25:08Vayu Hill-Maini:And we've had workshops with the Stanford farm, we've had public lectures, we've had, you know, pop up events. And it's been this amazing creative engine, I think, for all of us to appreciate how our fundamental work can have impact in the world, and how those perspective can also inform what we do in the first place. I mean, it's been amazing. I've never experienced anything like it. So let me ask you about that. I'm sure that you think pretty hard about the kind of chef and the kind of perspective that they would need to have to really take advantage of this program so what is the profile of like the chef that you say i need that chef to come here for is it like six months or a year or something like that exactly it's about you know a few months okay so what is the profile of the ideal kind of chef collaborator in residence i mean i think it's something who's somebody who's curious curiosity you know we're all driven by curiosity in my lab and among my colleagues.

26:03Vayu Hill-Maini:And I think having a chef who says, you know what, I want to learn. This might be unfamiliar, bioengineering genetics, but sort of this open mind to creativity and always being kind of thinking about the boundary of culinary creativity, boundary of knowledge. And Mugaritz, this restaurant in Spain, has been leading that in the world of food for the last 20 plus years. So I think you have to be curious. I think that's what was going to make it the most productive and most inspiring. And as I said, it's been – I mean, just to see the PhD students and everybody and the undergrads at Stanford learning about this and engaging with this, it's a rare voice on campus.

26:42It sounds fantastic. So, actually, let's use that scenario to go back to something you said earlier, which you said maybe there would be a molecule that gives us slightly less desirable. So, tell me, maybe even if you can, how you discover those molecules because, like, they don't come labeled. Like the mushroom doesn't say, by the way, I have this molecule and you're not going to like it. But I'm thinking that you, your chef in residence must have exquisite taste. And I mean that literally. This is a case where I'm talking about literal taste. Tell me a story about how you identify some molecule that might not be your favorite.

27:18Does that chef in residence bring a special capability there? I imagine that they might, but I don't know.