• Question: what is your favorite type of mushroom

    Asked by Tom.P.A.Monsell to Rupesh on 13 Jun 2016.
    • Photo: Rupesh Paudyal

      Rupesh Paudyal answered on 13 Jun 2016:

      Hi Tom,

      Great question.

      Mushrooms taste great and I like the one off Morrison’s shelf to cook for dinner. Did you know that mushrooms are flowering bits of fungi that contains their spores for fungi reproduction.

      Fungi are incredibly diverse and they produce many different chemicals that could be very poisonous for us. Also they produce chemicals that kills bacteria because they are always competing with bacteria in nature.

      My favourite fungi therefore must be Penicillium, a fungi that gave us the world’s first antibiotics (Penicillin) that kills bacteria.

      Sir Alexander Fleming discovered Penicillin, and many more antibiotics have been discovered since then. They have saved millions of lives. Before antibiotics a very minor infection could kill us but not it is very rare for people to die from small infections.

      But the current antibiotics resistance threatens this but that’s another story!

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