Professor Gary Strobel discusses his findings on "myco-diesel," which are being published Wednesday in The Journal of Microbiology in London.
Dr. Strobel made the discovery by chance, while collecting fungus from the stem of a tree in an old forest in southern Chile. When he finally got around to sending it off for sophisticated analysis ? years later ? he discovered that this version of Gliocladium wasn't like others he'd encountered before.
"I've scoured the earth for not only organisms like Gliocladium, but many other endophytes [a plant that lives in the tissue of another plant]. I've been to almost every rainforest on the planet," he tells Alex Chadwick. But, "in over 50 years, I've never seen anything like that."
Why would a fungus create diesel? Essentially to protect from plant invaders, he says.
He also discusses a brief scandal in his past that involved chainsawing trees and trashing an EPA document.