Hey,
Welcome to the first edition of The Substrate.
This is a bi-weekly letter from The Fungamental Company — part lab dispatch, part mycology briefing, part reading list. We're a mushroom lab in Bangalore. We grow, extract, and study fungi for a living. But this newsletter isn't really about our products. It's about the kingdom.
Fungi are doing things — in medicine, in agriculture, in materials science, in ecosystems we barely understand — that most people have no idea about. Researchers are publishing work that should be front-page news but ends up buried in journals. And in India, we're sitting on some of the richest fungal biodiversity on the planet — a vast diversity most people never hear about. We want to share more of it.
The Substrate exists to surface that work. Twice a month. No hype. No wellness fluff.
Let's get into it.
01 · From Our Lab
What's growing, what we're building, and what we're getting wrong — dispatches from the Fungamental lab in Bangalore.
What it actually takes to learn a species.
Every new mushroom arrives as a problem, and the problem is never the mushroom. It's everything around it.
You start with substrate — what this organism wants to eat, and what structure it wants to eat it in. Too dense and it suffocates. Too loose and it never builds the network it needs to fruit. You don't reason your way there; you run blocks, watch, adjust, run more. Each round costs weeks.
Then inoculation, a timing problem disguised as a technical one. Introduce your culture into a substrate that hasn't settled and you've handed the block to whatever else is in the room. Because something else is always in the room. That's what outsiders miss about contamination — it isn't an accident, it's the default. A sterile block is a vacancy, and the whole microbial world is house-hunting. Green mould doesn't announce itself politely; by the time you see it, you've lost.
And then the harvest window, where the craft lives. Pull too early and you've left yield and compounds on the table. Pull too late and the mushroom starts spending its own resources on spores — it isn't thinking about your extraction. That window can be hours, and it's read off the fruiting body itself: the margin, the colour, the way the surface changes. There's no sensor for it. There's a person who has seen it go wrong enough times to know.
Multiply that by every species we grow. That's what "two years" means when we say it.
This is what contamination looks like under the microscope, beautiful isn’t it?
The people who actually do this.
A lab is a set of habits held by specific people, so it's worth naming two of them.
Mousumi has a party trick that stopped being a trick a while ago. You hand her a fungus — ours, a photo from someone's backyard, something dubious in a bag from a market — and she tells you what it is. Not "that's a bracket fungus." The name. She's been with us [X] years and I haven't yet seen the thing that stumps her, which has become a mildly competitive project for the rest of us.
Venky is possessive about his mushrooms in a way I've come to understand is correct. He has been known to object, visibly, to anyone getting too close to a fruiting room at the wrong moment. He's marking [X] years with us this month. When someone is that territorial about an organism, your quality problem is mostly solved.
You can automate a lot of a lab. You can't automate someone caring whether the batch is good.
02 · From the World of Mycology
Three things worth knowing, from research we've been reading.
AGRICULTURE
The first farmers had six legs
We've been farming for about twelve thousand years. Ants have been at it for sixty-six million.
In 2024, Ted Schultz and colleagues at the Smithsonian built evolutionary trees from more than 2,000 gene regions across 475 fungi and 276 ant species. The dates in the two trees lined up, and they lined up on a bad day: the end-Cretaceous asteroid impact. Dust blocked photosynthesis, plants died, and the fungi that decompose dead plant matter had, in Schultz's phrasing, a heyday. Ants that already had a loose relationship with fungi found themselves standing in an unprecedented food supply. They never let go. About 27 million years ago one cultivar was cut off from its wild relatives and fully domesticated — neither partner can now survive alone.
Worth being precise: that date is for fungus farming in ants as a whole. The leafcutters — the ones everyone pictures, marching with leaf fragments overhead — are a much later development. They aren't eating those leaves. They're feeding them to a crop.
Read the paper → https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adn7179
BIOLOGY
Why some mushrooms glow, and why nobody's sure
More than 125 fungal species emit light, all of them in the Agaricales. The chemistry is now fully mapped — the only complete bioluminescence pathway we have for any eukaryote. It runs on caffeic acid, the same ordinary compound found in coffee: enzymes convert it step by step into a luciferin, luciferase adds oxygen, and the molecule sheds its energy as green light. The spent product is recycled back into caffeic acid and the loop runs again.
Kotlobay and colleagues worked this out in 2018, then did the obvious thing: moved the genes into yeast, which promptly glowed. Others have since put the pathway into tobacco plants that light themselves. A glowing plant is now an engineering problem, not a fantasy.
What we still don't know is why. The popular answer — the glow attracts insects that carry spores away — has real evidence behind it, including a 2015 study showing a Brazilian species runs its light on a circadian clock and draws insects when brightest. But a 2025 review pushes back: the glow may principally be a defence against oxidative stress, with the light a side effect — or in some species, a metabolic by-product evolution never switched off.
Both can be true in different mushrooms. We've solved the how completely and the why not at all.
Read the paper → https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1803615115
MEDICINE
The fungus that switches off your immune system
We spend most of this newsletter on what fungi do for us. Here's one doing the opposite. Between 40 and 60 per cent of healthy people carry Candida albicans right now, harmlessly, as ordinary microbial furniture. In someone immunocompromised, the same organism can enter the bloodstream and cause invasive candidiasis, where mortality approaches 50 per cent.
Philip Elks' group at the University of Sheffield has shown how. Neutrophils — our most abundant white blood cell, the first responders — kill invaders partly with reactive nitrogen species. Candida suppresses their production, pushing these molecules below their normal resting level, so the immune system is dimmed during the fight. The team found the same trick in other serious fungal pathogens, including Candida auris, the multidrug-resistant species the WHO lists as a critical priority. And the correlation is brutal: the better a strain suppressed that defence, the deadlier the infection.
The hopeful part is the inversion. Restoring that response improved survival alongside existing antifungals — which points at host-directed therapy: treating the patient rather than attacking the fungus. As resistance climbs and the antifungal pipeline stays thin, strengthening the host may matter more than finding the next drug. This is early work in zebrafish and human cells, not medicine yet. But it reframes fungal infection as being outmanoeuvred rather than overpowered.
References — Schultz T.R. et al. (2024), The coevolution of fungus-ant agriculture, Science 386(6717). · Kotlobay A.A. et al. (2018), Genetically encodable bioluminescent system from fungi, PNAS 115(50). · Oliveira A.G. et al. (2015), Current Biology 25(7). · Diversity, Distribution, and Evolution of Bioluminescent Fungi (2025), Journal of Fungi. · University of Sheffield, Bateson Centre (July 2026) — source the primary paper before publishing.
