What is the history of bread mold?

Question

How was it discovered? What's its purpose?

Answer 1

Most molds grow well on things like bread that has no preservatives, old coffee-grounds, orange rinds, old fruit (not bananas). Cheeses which are made with molds, such as Brie, Camebert, or true blue cheese, will grow out their molds when left in a warm, moist environment that has fresh air. Wet paper products, such as cardboard, or materials high in cellulose, such as wet hay or grass also will grow molds well.
Molds must have a moist environment to grow, with lots of fresh air. Molds will be overcome by bacteria growth if you put them in a plastic bag with no fresh air. Molds also need some light to produce their spores. Most molds do not grow well at very cold or very hot temperatures. Molds like a slightly acid environment, around pH=5.5 to 6.
Many times preservatives are added to bread and other foods to keep mold and other organisms from growing. Check the labels of the breads you use to see if they have preservatives. If preservatives are present, mold will not grow very well or not at all.

The Organism
Fungus is the umbrella term for mold, mildew, mushrooms, yeasts, and puffballs. Fungi have a kingdom all to themselves, like plants and animals. What they all have in common, for starters, is that all their cells have one or more nuclei, and none of them have chlorophyll, so they can't make their own carbohydrates.

Mildew is a popular term for visible mold in the home, but mycologists use it only for the molds that infect plants, like downy mildew.

The term mold applies to the microscopic members of this kingdom whose lifestyle involves putting out root-like rhizomes, releasing spores, and living in colonies. Although they are handicapped by their lack of chlorophyll and their inability to move around, they have compensated in a number of ways by their metabolic and reproductive versatility.

If they find themselves in a less than ideal situation (say, on an agar plate, away from their favorite food, with too much or too little light, the wrong temperature), they are likely to switch to a nonsexual method of reproduction (one not involving swapping or combining of genetic material) for the duration. This can make them hard to identify, since species are classified by their sexual characteristics (e.g., kind of spore cell wall, spore-producing cells, and sacs that store cells).

There is some evidence that fungi are responsible for foxing on the paper of old books, despite the fact that the brown spots don't look like mold colonies. A reason offered for their drab appearance is that the dry interior of a book is not an ideal growth environment, even for xerotolerant or xerophyllic species.

Any given mold species may be able to reproduce by two or more different methods: budding off from mycelial fragments, or release of sexual spores, asexual spores and conidia.

Conidia are asexual spores that are not formed inside a sporangium (sac), but by budding out or converting from an existing cell. They provide the organism with a way of producing rapidly and cheaply. They are produced in great numbers by fungi in the class Ascomycetes. Species in this class also produce sexual spores in abundance, within specialized cells called asci.

An example of a species with reproductive versatility is Penicillium brevicompactum, which can hybridize on its own, even though it is known as an asexual fungus.

Answer 2

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