Cheese Caves, Mutating Fungi, and Evolution You Can Actually See

A Chance Discovery in Vermont

Not every scientific breakthrough begins in a high tech lab. Sometimes it happens in a damp cave filled with cheese. Back in 2016, biologist Benjamin Wolfe from Tufts University took what seemed like a casual field trip to Jasper Hill Farm in Vermont. Officially, he said he wanted to collect samples of a cheese called Bayley Hazen Blue. Unofficially, he was helping his former postdoc advisor stage a marriage proposal at the same spot she had first met her partner.

The side plot worked the proposal happened but Wolfe left with something unexpected: frozen cheese samples tucked away in his lab “just in case.” That habit of hoarding old samples later paid off in ways no one could have predicted.

Fast forward a few years. A graduate student, Nicolas Louw, returned to Jasper Hill’s cheese caves big, cool, damp rooms carved into hillsides and collected more samples of the same cheese. Only this time, something looked different. The Bayley Hazen Blue, once covered in a leafy green fungus, had turned completely white.

At first glance, it might have seemed trivial. Mold changes color all the time, right? But to Wolfe’s team, this was something much bigger. It looked like evolution unfolding right before their eyes.

Why Color Matters for Fungi

The culprit behind the color change was a fungus called Penicillium solitum, a close relative of the molds that grow on bread or help make penicillin. Usually, this fungus appears green because of a pigment called melanin. In humans, melanin gives us skin and hair color and shields us from UV radiation. In fungi, it works much the same way acting like a protective coat.

But caves are dark. UV radiation isn’t really a threat down there. So why waste energy making melanin if you don’t need it?

One of Wolfe’s students, Jackson Larlee, traced the mystery to a specific gene, alb1. When this gene is disrupted, the fungus loses its ability to produce melanin. Without the pigment, the once green mold turned chalk white.

Biologists call this process “relaxed selection.” It’s what happens when a stressor like sunlight disappears, and the organism slowly ditches the traits it doesn’t need. Think of Mexican cave fish that lost their eyesight, or salamanders that adapted to darkness by giving up pigment. The cheese cave fungi were doing the same thing: streamlining themselves for life in the dark.

Not Just One Mutation, but Many

Here’s where the story gets even more interesting. The change wasn’t caused by one single mutation sweeping across the colony. Instead, different fungi developed the same trait through different genetic routes.

Some picked up tiny “point mutations” basically a typo in the DNA code, just one base pair flipped. Others had a far messier change: a transposable element, sometimes nicknamed a “jumping gene,” inserted itself right before the alb1 gene. That disrupted the normal function of the gene and killed melanin production.

Usually, transposable elements cause chaos. They can wreck important genes and destabilize DNA. But in this unusual case, the genetic disruption was helpful. The fungus saved energy by skipping melanin and redirected those resources into growth. In a competitive environment like a cheese rind battling for space energy efficiency can be the difference between thriving and fading away.

The bottom line: evolution doesn’t always follow one straight path. Sometimes, it takes multiple detours, all arriving at the same destination.

Why This Matters Beyond Cheese

At first glance, watching mold evolve on cheese might sound like a quirky footnote in biology. But the implications are surprisingly broad.

Louw points out that fungi destroy about 20% of crops before harvest and another 20% after harvest. That’s not just the fuzzy peach rotting in your kitchen it’s billions of dollars in food lost worldwide. The biggest threat to global food security may not be climate change alone, but fungal rot.

Understanding how fungi adapt to new environments could give us clues on how to slow or stop their spread. If fungi can so easily drop unneeded traits and conserve energy, then our strategies to control them may need to be smarter than just spraying fungicides. Otherwise, we risk creating the fungal equivalent of antibiotic resistance.

The lesson here is sobering: microbes evolve fast, sometimes right under our noses, or in this case, on our cheese.

A Link to Human Health

It’s not just agriculture. Fungal relatives of Penicillium like Aspergillus live in soil, dust, and even our ventilation systems. For most people, they’re harmless. But in hospitals or among people with weakened immune systems, certain Aspergillus strains can cause dangerous lung infections.

Studying how these organisms adapt to specific environments, whether it’s a dark cave or the human lung, could shed light on how pathogens settle into their hosts and how we might stop them.

From Evolution to Cheesemaking

Of course, there’s also a lighter side to all this. Wolfe’s lab isn’t just studying fungi for public health they’re also collaborating with Jasper Hill Farm to see if these evolving molds can create new flavors and textures in cheese.

They inoculated brie with the novel white mold, let it ripen for two months, and waited to see what would happen. The experiment isn’t just about aesthetics although a white rind can make cheese look striking it’s also about taste. Different microbial communities mean different chemical processes, which can change the creaminess, sharpness, or aroma of the final product.

It’s a playful reminder that science and food often overlap. What begins as a microbiology puzzle in the lab can end up reshaping something as everyday as what’s on your cheeseboard.

A Bigger Picture of Evolution

So what do we take away from this story? In part, it’s a vivid, almost poetic reminder that evolution is not a distant, abstract process it’s happening all the time, in unexpected corners of life. Sometimes you don’t need to peer through a telescope or trek through the rainforest. Sometimes, you just need to look closely at a wheel of cheese.

But it’s also a cautionary tale. If fungi can mutate so quickly to suit their environment, then our efforts to control them in food storage, in agriculture, even in medicine have to account for that adaptability. Otherwise, we’ll always be one step behind.

Still, there’s something oddly comforting about it too. A mold mutating in a Vermont cave may not solve the big problems of human existence, but it reminds us that the world is alive with constant change. Evolution isn’t locked away in textbooks it’s there in your pantry, in your garden, and yes, on that wedge of cheese you forgot in the fridge.

Open Your Mind !!!

Source: Flipboard