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MSU Scientist Changing Your World, One Fungus at a Time

So what’s myco-diesel? And who is Gary Strobel? Both are a little complicated. Myco-diesel is a collection of gases emitted by a South American fungus that eats cellulose and spews something remarkably close to diesel fuel. Think of it as a fungoid fart that just might power a school bus some day.

s c i e n c e

UNDER THERED HAT

B Y S C O T T M C M I L L I O N

Montana State University scientif ic researcher Gary Strobel has discovered solutions

to scores of problems, but his latest discovery, myco-diesel, just might change the world

only a handful of people in the world had ever heard the term “myco-diesel.” But if you Google it today, you’ll get thousands and thou-sands of hits. Click on any one of them and you’ll fi nd Gary Strobel’s name.

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Strobel is the guy who discovered the fungus and coined the term myco-diesel, the latest coup in a remarkable career based at Montana State University in Bozeman. Now 70, Strobel has a resume that would intimidate most scientifi c researchers. Through his studies of endophytes — microorganisms that live between the cells of plants — he’s fi gured out ways to fi ght crop diseases from Hawaii to Montana to Central America. He’s developed olive trees that thrive in the harsh Israeli desert. He’s discovered a better way to fi ght malaria. He invented a new method to make the cancer-fi ght-ing drug Taxol. He developed ways to safely handle human waste in some of the world’s most trying environments, like war zones and highly protected wilderness areas.

In 1987, he came up with a cure for Dutch elm disease in trees (more on this later) and, when the Environmental Protection Agency attacked him for scientifi c heresy for doing so, he stood his ground. He prepared himself to go to jail if necessary, then took his case to the United States Senate and forced the agency to back off. He’s mentored hundreds of students, he lectures around the world, advises biotechnology companies and sits on a variety of prestigious panels, and has attracted tens of millions

of dollars in research money to Montana, helping to push MSU into the top echelon of American research institutions. He travels the world, especially its jungles, discov-ering new life forms and drawing stares with his funny red hat, a homemade accessory that also serves as a collection bag, pillowcase or towel, depending on his immediate needs. (He’s made the hat distinctive enough that the Smithsonian Institution now owns one in its collection.) He also plays a mean didgeridoo, one of those big tubes played by Aborigines in Australia. Lots of people can honk away on one. But Strobel plays dance music. It’s a didgeridoo you can boogie to. He laughs easily, rides a little Honda motorcycle that’s

older than many of his students, and makes hardwood fountain pens in his spare time. He often calls himself Strobie. But he answers to Skip. Joe the professor he’s not. “He thinks what other people haven’t thought,” said Bill Hess, a retired biology professor from Brigham Young University who has collaborated with Strobel for decades. “And he does what other people haven’t done.” Like discovering a fungus that produces diesel fuel. Not that the idea hit him like lightning. Seven years before he announced his fi ndings, he had gathered a sample of Gliocladium roseum from an ulmo tree in Chile’s Patagonian rain forest, storing it in a freezer and meaning to get to it someday. “It mouldered in my gourd for all those years,” he said. “Then we had this fuel crisis.”

Then he started doing some analysis, which told him he had more to do. So he talked to the National Science Foundation about some grant money to pay for the complex chemical and genetic work it took to analyze the fungus and its output. “I think I’ve got a bug that makes diesel,” he told the foundation in his grant application. Three months later, he had the money. On Nov. 4, 2008, the peer-reviewed journal Microbiology published his research and the world learned that new word: myco-diesel. Today, Strobel keeps a sample in his MSU offi ce in a

Gary Strobel and his son Scott select material to sample from an ulmo tree (the source of the fungus) in the forest of Patagonia.

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Tupperware container, where it grows on a piece of wood he brought back from Chile. Pop the top and you’ll see a sparse pink fuzz on the wood. Stick your nose in there, and you’ll get a whiff of something that evokes oily rags, the smell on your hands after doing engine work, the air in a long-shuttered mechanic’s shop. It smells like possibilities.

A LITTLE HELP

MSU didn’t have the equipment Strobel needed to fully analyze and dissect G. roseum. So he reached out to the Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry Department of Yale University. “I think it has potential” to make marketable fuel, the department chairman said. “But we have a lot of science to do between now and then.” Many scientists in the rarifi ed echelons of Ivy League universities might look askance at a guy with a funny hat and an ancient motorcycle, calling from Montana to say he found a fungus that makes diesel fuel. But this call found a ready ear. The department chairman is Strobel’s son, Scott, who gained his position at the relatively tender age of 42. Now Yale and MSU have entered into a formal agreement to help each other develop the myco-diesel potential. But it’s not just the schools working together. It’s father and son. “That doesn’t happen in science very often,” Gary Strobel said. Scott Strobel said his father never pushed him toward a career in science, even though the smell of some lab chemicals still evokes memories of his childhood. He said his dad was always “a science guy,” and often took him to the lab, where he made snow cones in beakers and got to play with instruments delicate enough to measure the weight of his signature on a sheet of paper. But Gary worked regular hours and was home for dinner most nights. He hadn’t yet begun to explore the world’s jungles, risking disease and snakebite and heat stroke, parasites and strange food and ants that leave their jaws under your skin when they bite you. “All this Indiana Jones type of stuff didn’t come until later,” Scott said. And now son has joined father in far-fl ung expeditions. As a prestigious Howard Hughes Medical Institute professor, Scott Strobel uses that organization’s money to take under-graduates to places like the rain forests of Peru and Ecuador to gather endophytes, the organisms that make everything from disinfectants to medicine to, potentially, motor fuel. Gary Strobel goes along, sharing his knowledge in a variety of fi elds.

Gliocladium roseum, the “myco-diesel” fungus, as seen in different contexts. At top is the conidial stage

in a colorized photograph from a scanning electron microscope by Brad Geary at BYU. Center is a view of the fungus in culture on a petri plate. At bottom is the asoscarp or “perfect” stage on a beech stump. In this

stage, the fungus is called Ascoryne roseum.

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PHOTOS COURTESY OF GARY STROBEL

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“He knows a little bit about a lot of things,” Scott said. It’s not hard to fi nd people who are better than Gary in fi elds like botany, mycology or molecu-lar biology, he said. “But there aren’t very many who span the breadth like he does,” he said. Plus, he opens doors. With that red hat and his big grin, Gary interacts well with the natives. For adults, the hat makes an effec-tive icebreaker. For children, Gary often has a little toy car some-where in his pockets. “That’s the sort of thing he likes to do,” Hess said. “He assumes everybody likes him. He’ll joke and chat with anybody.” Scott Strobel’s program already shows the promise of future fruit. Students have discovered endo-phytes that could inhibit tubercu-losis, fi ght drug resistant diseases and accelerate the degradation of plastics, Scott Strobel said. And that’s the result of a handful of people making rela-tively brief trips to a small patch of jungle. There’s so much of it out there, and so many organisms yet to discover. That means the forests need to be protected, as do the native people who know them well. “The forest is a resource that needs to be protected, and for purposes other than producing wood,” Gary Strobel said. The program trains young scientists in ways to seek and discover, shows them techniques Gary Strobel fi gured out on his own. And it gives them a sense of ownership for their successes. Some have already patented their discoveries. “They can succeed at exploring where things aren’t known, which is what science is really all about,” Scott

Strobel said. His dad is dismissive of his role in the project. “Scott’s the Hughes Professor,” he said. “I’m just his fi eld grunt.” But he looked pretty proud when he said it.

CAME TO IT THE HARD WAY

Gary Strobel’s remarkablesuccesses took root in a potful of controversy in 1987, when Dutch elm disease was killing millions of stately elm trees around the country. He fi gured he could save some trees by injecting them with a genetically altered bacteria he had found on wheat, one that produces an antibiotic that protects the trees from the fungus that causes the European disease. So he dosed 14 elm saplings,

an action that he describes as an act of civil disobedience because the Environmental Protection Agency had forbidden the experiment. But the rules were indecipherable, even to EPA scientists. “I was ready to go to jail,” Strobel recalled. The United States Senate then took up the issue, in what the Wall Street Journal called “The Galileo Committee.” “Get off this man’s back,” former Sen. John Chaffee, a Rhode Island Republican and staunch environmentalist told the EPA. The agency eventually complied, but not before Strobel had been offi cially censured by MSU brass and he had chainsawed his experimental trees into bits. “It was the ultimate sideshow of my life,” Strobel says today. “I paid a lot of consequences for that.” But it paid off in the long run, partly because his treat-ment proved safe and effective, but mostly because it stirred his curiosity. If a wheatfi eld bacteria could save elm trees,

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With that red hat and his big grin, Gary interacts well with the natives. For adults, the hat makes an effective icebreaker. For children,

Gary often has a little toy car somewhere in his pockets.

Strobel sniffs a petri dish sample of Muscodor albus, or stinky white fungus, in his lab. The fungus makes volatile antibiotic gasses that kill other fungi and bacteria, Strobel said.

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what else might be possible? “I needed to fi nd out what these compounds are and what they might do,” he said. Scientists had already discov-ered that yew trees produce the cancer-fi ghting drug, Taxol. But Strobel went out, on his own dime, and found in the trees the endo-phyte that actually does the work. While it didn’t prove commer-cially viable, it got the world thinking about possibilities, and major drug companies started showing up with checkbooks for the university. “The people who had been telling me to get a lawyer (in the Dutch elm controversy) wound up greeting fi ve people from Eli Lilly,” he said. “That was two potent drugs coming from the fi elds and forests of Montana,” he noted. “What else is out there? To fi nd what’s out there, you have to go out there and look.” So that’s when the Indiana Jones stuff got started. He began bioprospecting around the world,

focusing on rain forests and their incredible diver-sity of life forms, particularly the tens of thousands of undiscovered endophytes. He went to Nepal and China, northern Australia and Peru, Borneo and the Amazon, toting home from each trip a shopping bag

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Strobel plays his didgeridoo — and plays it well — inside his offi ce.

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full of samples for analysis in his MSU lab, fi nancing most of these travels from his own pocket. He said he’s lost track of how many patents he’s fi led — “50 or 60, maybe” — for the products and process of these previously unknown organisms. But he plucked one of the most interesting — muscodor albans, which means “stinky white” — from a cinnamon tree in Honduras. He cultured that fungus in a petri dish and stored it in a plastic box with a number of other samples. But all the other samples died. Strobel fi gured out M. albans was pooting out antibiotic gases that killed the other fungi and bacteria. By replicating those gases with chemicals, he developed a way to disinfect human waste, and the product is now used by a thriving Belgrade company that ships toilets to the U.S. Army, disaster assistance groups and wilderness travelers needing to pack out their own waste. It’s also been licensed to an agricultural biotech company searching for natural ways to preserve fresh foods, and it has possibilities for the treatment of garbage. Strobel then started wondering if M. albans could be found in temperate forests, which led him to Chile, where he discovered G. roseum, the myco-diesel fungus.

Lab experiments showed that, unlike most fungi, G. roseum could survive in the presence of M. albans. So he wondered: Is it making gases, too? An analysis showed that it was, and that those gases contain most of the compounds that make up diesel fuel. When he read the chemical assay, “all the hairs on my arm stood up,” he said. Making commercial quantities of fuel is far from reality. It would require massive amounts of fungus, machinery to gather and distill the gases on an industrial scale, and some-thing for the fungus to digest. Strobel is hoping the food will be cellulose, the most common material on the planet and one of the cheapest. (For now, G. roseum has a sweet tooth, and emits more gas when it eats things like oatmeal or agar. But that could change with some genetic manipulation.) The world’s economy already spends billions every year, just trying to dispose of paper, straw and wood waste. Could it become fuel instead? Plus, myco-diesel could ease climate change fears because it would be carbon neutral.

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Gary Strobel walks from his offi ce to the lab where he teaches at Montana State University.

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Burning fossil fuels releases “trapped” carbon that has been stored for millions of years deep in the Earth. Burning myco-diesel also would release carbon into the atmosphere, but that carbon would be reabsorbed by growing plants. This type of emission is “a hitchhiker on the carbon cycle,” Strobel said. “It’s better to burn a log than coal.” And there might be better bugs out there, he said. One of Scott Strobel’s students has already found a very promising one. Gary Strobel said he doesn’t do this work for the money. He’s made a few hundred thousand dollars in licensing fees and other revenue, but that was spread over decades. No matter what happens, don’t look for him in a private jet, he said. “If a product from Australia made it big, he’d send a lot of the money back there to the people who helped him,” Hess said. “Money is a tool for his science, but it’s not his goal. He

wants to push the frontiers of science.” Strobel is hoping to have a myco-diesel demonstration project set up within a couple years. He compares its poten-tial to the fi rst fl ight of an airplane by the Wright brothers in 1903, a journey of only 120 feet. “In less than 15 years, they were using airplanes in World War I,” Strobel said. “Undoubtedly, there are some bioengi-neering problems I will face.” While it took awhile before you could purchase a fi rst class ticket to Bombay, it eventually became commonplace. People who knew the Wright brothers at Kitty Hawk lived to see modern jets skipping around the globe. Just four months ago, nobody had ever heard of myco-diesel. They just might live long enough to buy a tankful.

An analysis showed that it was, and that those gases contain most of the compounds that make up diesel fuel. When he read the chemicalassay, “all the hairs on my arm stood up,” he said.

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