While Joe Lane, left, and Ryan Iacovacci are growing mushrooms to feed people, they’re also working to save the planet.
The owners of Myconaut were awarded a grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to study how fungi can remediate PFAS in the soil. They’ve also been accepted into the NVIDIA Inception Accelerator Program to help them develop AI solutions for bioremediation.
The mycologists, along with Chief Science Officer Tyler Watson, are working on a way to feed lab and field data into an AI model and come up with a recommendation to remediate soil contaminated with PFAS. “It may even find patterns we didn’t see,” Tyler said. “We’re basically leveraging Mother Nature’s algorithms.”
Northern Initiatives’ role in this has been to help Myconaut buy its Marquette Mushrooms grow container – and it’s a beauty. The pair were unable to get a loan from a bank, due to the startup nature of the business; Northern Initiatives used funds from the Michigan CDFI Coalition to make the loan. Watch a great video of the container’s arrival here: https://www.imcoldproductions.com/commercial/marquette-mushrooms
The container is ensconced at Northern Michigan University, where they not only grow the mushrooms Wildcats eat, but it’s a classroom as well. The pair also leads workshops and organizes mushroom forays, which is how Tyler, a graduate of NMU, first found them. “I’d heard of Mushroom Joe before I met him,” he said. “Everyone needs a Mushroom Joe!” Ryan laughed.
Marquette Mushrooms helps fund the biotech side of the business, with a goal to grow 1,500 lbs. of Lion’s Mane, Blue Oyster, and Black Oyster mushrooms each month. “NMU can use 1,500 pounds a month,” Ryan said. The container can grow year-round and “it’s cost-effective,” Ryan said. They also have a wild mushroom license from the state, so they’re able to buy from and sell to the public.
Tyler led the grant-writing for the NSF opportunity; he graduated with a degree in Medicinal Plant Chemistry from NMU and taught Chemistry there as well. “There’s usually no work for chemists here (Marquette), so I feel very fortunate.”
Leading a biotech start-up in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula has been a process, the founders said, and part of the evolution has been their mission. “We’ve gone from healing people to healing the planet to asking, ‘What else can we fix?’,” Ryan said. The website tagline is “Nothing is forever, not even PFAS.”
PFAS, or per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, are chemicals that have been used in consumer, commercial, and industrial products and are found in water, air, fish, and soil around the world. Michigan has been leading the way in PFAS detection, which makes it sound like we have the most, Ryan said, but it’s actually because Michigan has done the most testing. That said, there are farms that have been shut down due to PFAS contamination, meaning entire families have lost their livelihoods.
One of those farms is serving as a kind of lab for PFAS remediation, including Myconaut’s trials. “We’ll sample the soil, plant a 10-by-10 patch of trees, inoculate the roots, and come back six months later,” Joe said. “Then we test again and see how they’re doing.” The fungi and trees share nutrients and “you can kinda teach mushrooms to do stuff. Nature’s really good at this.”
Read more about Myconaut’s NSF grant and PFAS remediation here.