FABIans Prof. Brenda Wingfield and Prof. Cobus Visagie were part of teams that were successfully awarded funding from the Wellcome Trust as part of the call on the Biology of fungal adaptation. These awards support research that explores the mechanisms and triggers for fungal adaptation, particularly in environments that are associated with disease and/or impacted by climate change.

The first grant, titled "Mechanisms of gene flow in pathogenic fungi allowing fungal adaptation," aims to uncover the molecular processes that enable genetic exchange among fungi, which is a key driver of adaptation to hosts, antifungal agents, and climate change. The four-year international collaboration, led by Prof. Paul Dyer at the University of Nottingham, involves key partners at the Universities of Pretoria, Manchester, and others. It will focus on both filamentous fungi and yeasts, investigating poorly understood aspects of fungal biology such as male/female sexual identity, high-fertility strains, mate choice, clade incompatibility, and their roles in adaptation. Advanced genomic tools - including QTL mapping, CRISPR-Cas9, barcoding, and high-throughput sequencing - will be used to explore gene flow and its potential to facilitate heat tolerance and antifungal resistance, particularly in Fusarium and Candida albicans. This work has critical implications for disease management and understanding the emergence of new pathogenic lineages under environmental pressure.

The second project was titled ‘CryptoADAPT: Cryptococcus adaptation to causing human disease in Africa through pathogen thermotolerance’. Cryptococcus is one of the most important opportunistic human fungal pathogens in the world, with mounting evidence that suggests its evolutionary origin in southern Africa. The project will combine ecology, experimental evolution, genomics and fungal biology to better understand how Cryptococcus evolve in natural African biodiversity hotspots to become human pathogens. CryptoADAPT bring together partners from FABI, the University of the Witwatersrand, Stellenbosch University, Centro de Investigação em Saúde de Manhiça (CISM) in Mozambique, the University of Zambia, Imperial College London in the United Kingdom, and Duke University in the United States.