"Harry Adam Knight - Fungus" - читать интересную книгу автора (Knight Harry Adam)

still further. The microscope confirmed her fear. The hymenium was not forming any spore cells. She
sighed and rested her chin on her hands. So her triumph was not yet 100% successful. She, and her small
team of assistants, had succeeded in creating a giant, fast-growing, protein rich mushroom but the
genetically engineered organism that produced these traits obviously inhibited the mushroomтАЩs
reproductive cycle.

Originally Jane and her team had attempted to reach their goal by genetically altering the mushroom spore
cell itself

but nearly four years of effort produced no worthwhile results. Unraveling the genetic code of an
organism even as simple as the agaricus bisporius fungus was a monumental task that Jane finally
realized they lacked the resources to successfully accomplish. Unless she was given an extra 20 people
and unlimited fundsтАФboth of which she knew were out of the questionтАФthey might still be trying to
crack the code in 10 yearsтАЩ time.

So Jane had decided to try another approach. Instead of trying to alter the whole organism genetically she
instructed her assistants that from then on they would approach the problem from a different angle and
concentrate on only one aspect of the mushroomтАЩs metabolism. They would isolate the enzymes that
helped to control the mushroomтАЩs size, growth rate, and protein retention level, and then try and modify
them accordingly.

Isolating the specific enzymes-and fortunately there were only twoтАФtook a further 12 months. Jane and
her team then began to try and build an artificial enzyme that would supersede the functions of the two
existing ones within the a. bisporus cells and accelerate the relevant processes at least a hundred-fold.

It had been a long and painstaking job recombining the DNA strands of the enzymes in an attempt to
create the desired chemical structure that would in turn act like a super-catalyst within the mushroom.

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Enzymes, however, are extremely unstable; their crucial three-dimensional structures often falling apart in
only a few hours.

To overcome this problem Jane and her team were obliged to build, finally, a micro-organism that was
more like a virus in structure than an ordinary enzyme. But even when theyтАЩd succeeded in creating this
unusually stable macro-enzyme they had yet to hit upon the precise chemical combination of the four
basic chemical sub-units of deoxyribonucleic acid, DNA, that would produce the desired effects in the
mushroom.

So the last 18 months had been spent in testing different versions of the enzyme on the a. bisporus spore
cells. Each manufactured enzyme had differed from the others in only the smallest and subtlest ways in
their atomic structure but when introduced to the spores they produced widely differing changes in the
mushrooms, many of them drastic but none of them the required ones. Until now.

Now, with Enzyme Batch CT-UTE-8471 theyтАЩd hit the jackpot. Or almost. . . .

Jane regarded the giant mushroom thoughtfully. Even

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