You Can Be Anything › All careers › Science & Research
Mycologist
Studies fungi — mushrooms, molds, and yeasts — and their uses in medicine, food, and ecology.
Did you know?
A honey fungus in Oregon's Malheur National Forest covers about 9 square kilometres and may be around 8,000 years old, one of the largest living things known.
How subjects help
- Biology: Identify mushrooms and molds by their spores and study how they grow underground.
- Chemistry: Extract useful substances from fungi, the way penicillin was first found in a mold.
- Environmental Science: Study how fungi break down dead leaves and wood and link tree roots in a forest.
- Health Sciences: Identify fungal infections and poisonous mushrooms that can make people ill.
A famous name
Elias Magnus Fries: Swedish mycologist who named thousands of fungi and is called the 'Linnaeus of Mycology'.
Try it yourself: Blow up a balloon with yeast
- Pour about 5 cm of warm tap water into each bottle and add a teaspoon of dried yeast to both.
- Add one teaspoon of sugar to one bottle only, then swirl both gently.
- Stretch a balloon over the neck of each bottle and stand them somewhere warm.
- Check every 5 minutes for 20 minutes and note what the balloons are doing. Which bottle made more gas, and what does that tell you the yeast needs? (Leave them for an hour to see even more.)
Microbiologists grow microbes in different conditions and measure what they produce, which is how bakers, brewers and medicine makers learn to use yeast and bacteria.
Adapted from The Francis Crick Institute: Bring a balloon to life.
Also try: Clean an oily feather.
Known for it in
USA, Japan, UK, Netherlands, China