Radiation-eating mold could help clean up nuclear sites protect astronauts

This dark discovery is breaking the mold.

Scientists have discovered an unlikely ally in the battle to clean up Chernobyl’s radiation zones — the black mold that thrives in them.

A research team found that the fungi not only adapted to a radioactive environment, but actually fed off it like something out of a “Marvel” origin story, the BBC reported.

If this is true, the so-called deadly substance — radiation — could be one of the more unlikely building blocks of life.

The groundbreaking research was set in motion in 1997 after Ukrainian microbiologist Nelli Zhdanova embarked on a field expedition in the ruins of the Nuclear Power Plant near Prypiat, Ukraine, which, just eleven years earlier, had been the site of the worst nuclear accident in history.

A series of errors had caused a reactor meltdown, prompting an explosion and subsequent radiation fallout that killed 31 people and left untold victims with cancer.

To reduce the risk of radiation exposure, authorities established a 19-mile exclusion zone around the site to keep people safe from the radioactive remains of the reactor in question.

However, while people steered clear, Zhdanova noticed that the aforementioned black mold had taken up residence in this so-called dead zone. Meanwhile, subsequent surveys of the surrounding soil showed that the mold — which encompassed 37 different species — appeared to be growing towards the source of the radiation.

Zhdanova’s research concluded that the organisms were drawn to the ionizing radiation, defined as electromagnetic or particulate radiation that’s powerful enough to separate electrons from atoms, fomenting chemical changes in cells and damaging DNA.

Why would anything living be attracted to a substance that would ordinarily kill and mutate its victims? Zhdanova suspected that it had to do with the fact that mold was loaded with melanin, the pigment responsible for dark hair and skin color, which was also why the species of mold in the area were black.

She theorized they were protecting the fungi against ionizing radiation in the same way that darker skin shields skin from the sun.

But Chernobyl’s fungi weren’t just adapting to the radiation — they were feeding off it. In 2007, Ekaterina Dadachova, a nuclear scientist at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York, built on Zhdanova’s research after revealing that the organism increased while in the presence of radiation. This indicated they were harnessing it — a phenomenon she dubbed “radiosynthesis.”

One could think of it like plants feeding off sunlight — but far more powerful. “The energy of ionizing radiation is around one million times higher than the energy of white light, which is used in photosynthesis,” said the researcher Dadachova. “So you need a pretty powerful energy transducer, and this is what we think melanin is capable of doing — to transduce [ionising radiation] into usable levels of energy.” 

Radiosynthesis remains just a theory as scientists have yet to discover the exact mechanism by which the fungi convert radiation into energy.

However, if true, this has major ramifications for a variety of crucial applications, from radiation cleanup at sites like Chernobyl and Fukushima to space exploration — specifically shielding astronauts against harmful cosmic radiation.

“There is a lot of interest by scientists and space agencies in harnessing the power of natural pigments such as melanin for radiation protection during space exploration,” Dr. Arturo Casadevall, professor and chair of molecular microbiology and immunology at Johns Hopkins University, told Newsweek. “Materials containing melanin and even black fungi grown in space could help shield humans in spacecraft.”

He added, “The changes observed in the Chernobyl region show that life can be resilient and adapt rapidly to deleterious environmental conditions, including radiation contamination.”

In 2018, researchers even sent one of the Chernobyl molds, a strain dubbed Cladosporium sphaerospermum, to the International Space Station and found that it grew at an accelerated rate — although they haven’t definitively pinpointed that radiation was the cause.

Fortunately, the team also tested the protective potential of the melanin in the same strain by placing a sensor beneath a swatch of fungi aboard the International Space Station. They found that this black bioshield blocked the radiation with its efficacy increasing as it grew.

“Considering the comparatively thin layer of biomass, this may indicate a profound ability of C. sphaerospermum to absorb space radiation in the measured spectrum,” the team wrote.