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Husker researchers studying fungus that could be melanin resource

Several years ago, Erin Carr’s doctoral adviser Steven Harris handed her bags of soil collected from the soil crust of a cold British Columbian desert. She went to work on it, suspending it in liquid, plating it onto a growth medium and treating it with antibiotics and antifungals. Then, she replated the tiny black dots that emerged.

Those dots turned out to be a novel fungus — Exophiala viscosa, though Carr dubbed it Goopy — that may just be a resource for large-scale, cost-effective production of melanin, with applications in ultraviolet-protective products and advanced materials for aerospace and other industries.