Building on the first Mycobiomics network, the new project brings together 13 organisations across 11 countries, funded through Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions Staff Exchanges under Horizon Europe (grant agreement No 101300044) and coordinated by Prof. Marc Stadler, head of the “Microbial Drugs” department at the Helmholtz Centre for Infection Research. New partners in Denmark, France and the United Kingdom join the network, and the reach now extends to Colombia and Brazil.

Work spans four continents and covers evolutionary biology, ecology, taxonomy and systematics, drug discovery, plant pathology, food chemistry, biotechnology and bioeconomy, with the shared aim of understanding and applying the global mycobiota.

The Forestry and Agricultural Biotechnology Institute (FABI), University of Pretoria, participates as a partner institution, represented by Dr Neriman Yilmaz, Prof. Cobus Visagie and Prof. Bernard Slippers, with a wider group of FABI researchers, postdoctoral fellows and postgraduate students contributing to the work. Our focus lies in fungal taxonomy and systematics, mycotoxins and food safety, comparative and functional genomics, and plant and tree health.

Central to the programme is the exchange of people rather than data alone. Over the project period, postdoctoral fellows, postgraduate students and early-career researchers from FABI will undertake secondments in partner laboratories abroad, and we will host incoming researchers in Pretoria.