“Close but no cigar?”

It is an interesting idea but not very useful at the moment

Certainly a neat idea. But when I go to the farmer's market, mushrooms are relatively expensive per pound. Why not use something cheaper like, say, corn cobs that must be much cheaper.

if we go back 450 million years ago we'd find giant fungi the size of large buildings.

i can't believe this paper didn't cover mycotronics.

also it fails to mention that mushrooms are natures chemists, given sufficient time the can be trained or bio-hacked to breakdown & digest almost anything. the 5th kingdom they are not plants! they emit co2 and consume oxygen.

myco-chitin is a ridiculously interesting in terms of it's tensile strength to weight ratio outperforming virtually all composites including kevlar. the chitin material is a dilectric and can be impregnated with wire strands or other conductive metals to make very interesting unparalleled e-fabrics out of myco-leather.

the "gap" is that mushrooms aren't farmed for aerospace applications, and most of what you find at a farmers market will be either small batch cultivated or more commonly discovered by humans (probably hippies) who spend time wandering through a large forest.

the reality is mushrooms are renewable resources, they can at scale compete effectively with cellulose, and everything you know about useful cellulose -- mushrooms are at least 100x better, but it's easier to cut down a tree than grow a mushroom the size of one.

also the mushrooms require a complex fabrication system and most of the processes we see today are proof of concept, very manual, lacking sufficient automation to compete with plastic & cellulose (so they appeal mostly for novelty, not value).

yes - i've got my own applications in development. no, i won't tell you.