I live in Illinois, and like other US states, it has many state symbols. These include: flower, violet; fossil, Tully monster; fungus, giant puffball; insect, monarch butterfly; exercise, cycling; animal, white-tailed deer; dance, square dance; and microbe, Penicillium rubens.
Some of these are projects initiated by school children, but that microbe comes with some serious history.
In 1928, Alexander Fleming showed that Penicillium rubens had antibacterial properties, but penicillin was difficult to produce. Meanwhile, by the 1940s, World War II was underway, and the Allied troops needed a lot of antibiotics.
The US National Center for Agricultural Utilization Research got to work in Peoria, Illinois, searching for the right strain of the fungus to use for mass production. That strain was found in 1943 in a moldy cantaloupe from a local grocery store. Soon, millions of doses of the antibiotic were ready for the invasion of Normandy. As the result of government support for scientific research, the world was made safe for democracy again.
The Land of Lincoln stands proud.
Semiosis 