Question

What is poisonous enough to kill 100,000 turkeys? That’s the question asked by scientists who studied a mass die-off of turkeys in Great Britain. It turned out that all the turkeys had eaten peanuts from Brazil. A fungus was growing on the peanuts. The fungus produced a dangerous poison called aflatoxin. Aflatoxins cause stomach pain, lung failure, cancer, and death in people and animals.

Farmers make a great effort to prevent fungi from growing on their stored crops. In a pile of grain or nuts, fungi have plenty of food and living space. The best way for farmers to prevent fungi from growing is to make sure there is not enough
for ____fungi to survive and grow
what i put in the blank?

Answer 1

Answer: The best way for farmers to prevent fungi from growing is to make sure there is not enough moisture for fungi to survive and grow

Explanation: Fungi require moisture or water for a wide number of reasons. One of the best guesses I can give as a reason to why they might need it is to help them in the process of digestion. Fungi use digestive enzymes which are specially shaped proteins that break down macromolecules like glucose or cellulose and a number of other biological molecules, and they do this through one of two processes, dehydration synthesis, or hydrolysis. Hydrolysis in particular is the one that requires water. It uses pieces of water to break a bond between complex sugars and carbohydrates among other molecules, to separate them into smaller and easier to absorb monomers which are the subunits that make up the molecule. It breaks apart the water and uses the pieces to fill in the gaps of the pieces the monomers used to share.