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Immortal mushrooms? Like some quill does? Googling it is spammed by "mushroom of immortality" because of some chinese legend. But may be the same thing.
So most fungi do have a lifespan, they have teleomere decay, and when you're cloning mushrooms (from propagating mycelia) you have to let them go to fruit (the part that looks like a mushroom) every now and then. It's a pain in the ass.
But like the other poster said, they play it fast and loose with which part you consider the "organism". My favorite thing is that they do cytosolic streaming. Genetics can be a pain on mushrooms because not only do they share nutrients and metabolic burden through mycelia, they can share nuclei.
One of the weird convienent realities we used extensively is that cells are big enough you can spread them over a petri dish with a little loop, and if you diluted the initial sample enough, the colonies that developed were, practically speaking, from one parent cell. So you could try to modify a bunch, and then plate them (spreading the cells around) and pick individual colonies that were all clones from a single parent. Fungi mycelia means the nucleus isn't stuck in one cell. It also means expression levels can be variable (some cells will have multiple nuclei, and then later maybe they don't).
Fungi are a godamn pain in the ass to study. They're not mysterious, they're not alien, they're just fucking assholes.
Being a mycologist sounds a lot like being a mechanic who works on German cars
Based on the Wikipedia article on biological immortality referencing species that live for a couple hundred years and the Wikipedia page on armillaria ostoyae mentioning living specimens that are multiple millenia old (and thousands of acres large!), I'm guessing that may be what the prof is referring to?
I'm guessing they're talking about clones?
Yeah, lots of living beings do that.
Not clones, more of a ship of Theseus scenario. A fungal network can be "one thing" because we see it as a single interconnected system. But parts grow and die over time. It doesn't have individual cells that are infinitely old, but the one wholistic fungal organism, as we define it, can live forever through regrowth. There are types of jellyfish that can also "live forever" in this same way.
Botanists call this "cloning".
Like when you cut a bit off one plant and make a new plant you have 2 plants but they're genetically identical.
There's never two fungi here though, the mycelium is always continuous. There's never another individual structure either, like ribosomal cloning, it's just more hyphae.
Amazing.
Words are violence