Loc.: Slovenia, 1200 amsl, alps photo:http://agrozoo.net/jsp/Galery_one_image.jsp?id_galery_obfuscated=740ba4ec8c1e49b7ae8bb7e1de139ef2
nope, chaga is attached to trees, mine to stone, 1 mm thick. see similar: http://oceana.org/en/explore/marine-wildlife/black-tar-lichen but that appears at sea tidal area as it looks.
I agree frog. Woulnt it be interesting if instead of concentrating iron out of seawater to 2.5 million times as the black lichen does, it concentrated gold or some other choice metal? zuzzo
Yeah, but that would take one smart guy with genetic engineiring & biochemistry superb knowledge. Also. as far as I know it takes decades that licken grows anything at all. Correcting speed of growth would be a must too.
I think the hardest part would be to manipulate the proteins that selectively choose iron to sequesture and toggle their expression/makeup which would result in them selectively sequestering a range of different metals and then fine tune the selection to that of gold. That genetic sequestering information could then be transferred into a more amenable host for expression or further adding favoured genes to the lichens genome to increase its growth rate. Difficult yes, but not impossible.
