Wobill Ciatta, Zhang Ziyu, Fischer Peter, Rühs Patrick A
Institute of Food, Nutrition, and Health, ETH Zürich, 8092 Zürich, Switzerland.
ACS Appl Bio Mater. 2025 Jun 16;8(6):5024-5031. doi: 10.1021/acsabm.5c00374. Epub 2025 Jun 6.
There is a rising demand for sustainable, biodegradable, and robust materials in response to growing environmental concerns. Here, we propose using delignified wood as a scaffold for fungal proliferation to obtain wood-fungi composites. The delignification process preserves the fiber directionality inherent to natural wood, enabling fungi to grow along these fibers, enhancing the composites' mechanical properties, and promoting anisotropic fungal growth. The delignified wood was used as a scaffold for the growth of and . Both wood-fungi composites exhibited a higher mechanical strength after fungal proliferation. We used balsa, poplar, and spruce as wood to demonstrate the effects of varying wood architectures. Even though the tensile strengths of all three wood scaffolds were not significantly different, wood scaffolds with lower densities promoted fungal growth. Increasing agar and glucose concentrations were found to significantly enhance tensile strength and Young's modulus. The tensile strength and Young's modulus of wood scaffolds increased from 10 kPa to nearly 10 kPa and 10 GPa to nearly 10 GPa, respectively. These results highlight the versatile nature of delignified wood as a platform for fungal growth. It offers tunable properties that can be optimized for various applications in composite manufacturing.
随着环境问题日益受到关注，对可持续、可生物降解且坚固的材料的需求不断增加。在此，我们提议使用脱木质素木材作为真菌增殖的支架，以获得木材-真菌复合材料。脱木质素过程保留了天然木材固有的纤维方向性，使真菌能够沿着这些纤维生长，增强复合材料的机械性能，并促进各向异性真菌生长。脱木质素木材被用作 和 生长的支架。真菌增殖后，两种木材-真菌复合材料均表现出更高的机械强度。我们使用轻木、杨树和云杉作为木材，以展示不同木材结构的影响。尽管所有三种木材支架的拉伸强度没有显著差异，但密度较低的木材支架促进了真菌生长。发现增加琼脂和葡萄糖浓度可显著提高拉伸强度和杨氏模量。木材支架的拉伸强度和杨氏模量分别从10 kPa增加到近10 kPa和从10 GPa增加到近10 GPa。这些结果突出了脱木质素木材作为真菌生长平台的多功能性质。它提供了可调节的特性，可针对复合材料制造中的各种应用进行优化。
