How fire-loving fungi learned to eat charcoal

Some of the fungi use gene duplication, like a biological copy-paste mechanism, to make more of the enzymes needed to digest charcoal. “But it gives this fungus the genes it needs to break down burn scars.”The team also identified how some fungi survive fire itself. Understanding how certain fungi are able to break down charcoal could ultimately benefit humans. If researchers gain a better understanding of the ways fungi digest such things, they could one day be used to clean up contaminated environments. While there are a number of books written about the ways that plants survive fires, there is much less information about fungi.