You do have a wonderful way with words!

It's a meme pic, so I'm just wildly gesticulating and making giant assumptions here: I doubt it's the "mushroom" fruiting body that's doing anything in this research. It's almost certainly the mycelium or we're dealing with something like slime molds or yeast which don't produce mushrooms at all.

Yes I made this comment without reading the rest of the thread or hunting down the story. Sue me.