Ryan's Quest Project - Mushrooms and Mining: How Desert Fungi Can Drive Sustainable Mining in Arizona
Ryan is a First Year Franke Wildcat majoring in Engineering (undecided) and minoring in Spanish and Future Earth Resilience.
Tell us about your Quest Project:
Arizona’s copper mines yield mine tailings with high concentrations of unextracted copper metal and other toxic heavy metal byproducts. These heavy metals can leach into the soil through processes such as stormwater infiltration or spread to nearby localities in the form of dust, posing considerable environmental and/or human health risks. However, macrofungi are proven to be able to accumulate heavy metals in their fruiting bodies and mycelium, providing a convenient medium for removing heavy metals from soils and mine tailings. Macrofungi native to Arizona’s deserts are of particular interest due to their resistance to common desert environmental stressors, including low rainfall, high temperatures, soil salinity, and low soil nutrient content, making them promising for effective in-situ or ex-situ heavy metal soil bioremediation efforts in Arizona.
Thus far, my Quest project has taken the form of a scientific literature review, but I plan to begin active experimentation this coming summer. My current preliminary experimental design features the analysis of various desert macrofungi species and their ability to accumulate copper and other common toxic heavy metals from authentic copper mine tailings. Provided that my research yields successful results, I hope to pursue follow-up studies exploring methods for optimizing heavy metal soil bioremediation with desert macrofungi and extracting economic heavy metals from a desert fungus’s fruiting body.
Going into my first semester, I was expecting to become an optical engineer. However, after going on my first Mt. Lemmon mushroom foray with the University of Arizona's MycoCats Club in the fall, I immediately knew that I was pursuing the wrong field. Something about the mushrooms was weirdly captivating. When I later learned that mushrooms were capable of accumulating toxic heavy metals, I was inexplicably hooked by the idea of saving the environment with mushrooms. I wanted to know more, so I began to read some research papers. What I found was a seeming lack of studies addressing the heavy metal bioremediation of desert soils, let alone with macrofungi in Arizona. With this gap in scientific knowledge, I was officially convinced to pursue an independent research project through Quest.