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A comment on Radiotrophic fungus. Parent comment

Re:Radiotrophic fungus by londons_explore on Wednesday July 03, 2019 @10:07AM (#20344381)
No known biological process can "destroy" a radioactive isotope...

I wonder what they mean... Perhaps they simply mean "break up"

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Re:Radiotrophic fungus by vilhelm_s on Wednesday July 03, 2019 @10:58AM (#20344796)
I guess the papers they cite are in Russian, so maybe someone else can dig into it more, but at least they link to abstracts in English [1,2] which say

> Two ways of radioactive particles destruction by C. cladosporioides were established, one of them is a direct way by fungal overgrowth of hot particles and the second one an indirect way only by fungal metabolites.

> It has been found out for the first time that Cladosporium cladosporioides and Penicillium roseo-purpureum are able actively overgrow "hot" particles whose radioactivity did not exceed 3.1-1.0(-7) Ci by gamma-spectrum and to destroy them 50-150 days later.

So it seems that the fungus forms a layer around the particle?

[1] https://europepmc.org/abstract/med/12664550 [2] https://europepmc.org/abstract/med/1753889

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Re:Radiotrophic fungus by k__ on Wednesday July 03, 2019 @11:50AM (#20345356)
With "destroy" you mean turning something radio-active in something non-radio-active?
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Re:Radiotrophic fungus by layoutIfNeeded on Wednesday July 03, 2019 @01:38PM (#20346559)
That would mean the fungus is capable of nuclear transmutation.

I’d highly doubt that.

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