Fungi - The One Hundred Thousand

[Music] smuts moles rusts milus different kinds of fungi [Music] probably the fungi we know best are the ones that spoil our food literally thousands of types of funi attack and destroy [Music] crops [Music] others attack our canned and preserved Foods almost as soon as they're exposed to air one of the best known fungi is bread mold fungi attack every kind of organic matter even paper wood and cloth although we usually think of fungi as harmful they can also be beneficial because many fungi decompose dead matter and return it to the soil along with bacteria they recycle all the substances that make up life on Earth fungi are one of the necessary links in the cycle of [Music] Life fungi have been on the earth for millions of years and they have adapted to survive in almost every environment they can be found in the water the soil even in the air today we know of at least 100,000 different species of fungi and there may be [Music] more [Music] the visible part of the fungi what we can see with the naked eye is called the melium when we look closer we can make out that the melium is made up of thousands of tiny threads or [Music] filaments under the microscope we begin to enter their unique world the filaments we see now extend from Little ball-like shapes the spores with time-lapse photography we can see that the filaments or Hy grow out of the spores as the fungus grows the Hy multiply and spread into the host organism and slowly the fungus digests its [Music] host some kind of fungi reproduced sexually through the union of two different spores others reproduce alone asexually reproduction takes place on the end of the Hy the ball called a sporangium is really a spor case each sporangium contains thousands of spores the spor case matures it bursts open setting free the thousands of new spores each of these develops new hyle filaments this process repeats itself over and over again until the food supply is [Music] exhausted some fungi secrete special poisons antibiotics to keep bacteria away from their food more importantly for us some of these antibiotics will also kill bacteria in people today many of the miracle drugs of the 20th century penicillin streptomycin pamy and others are produced from antibiotics made Naturally by fungi the antibiotics are made by first providing a nutrient or food that the mold thrives [Music] in the mold is aseptically removed from its container then it's streaked across the nutrient depositing thousands of microscopic [Music] pores the culture is warmed to speed the growth of the [Music] fungus as the spores grow and produce hyy they also produce the miraculously effective antibiotics that later can be separated from the Fungus and purified to be made into medicine with the help of the lowly fungus we have almost wiped out many diseases bacterial pneumonia typhoid fever tuberculosis scarlet fever and denter to name a few who knows what other life-saving Secrets may be contained in the 100,000 species of [Music] fungi [Music]