Talk by Professor Neil Gow, University of Exeter.
Good Fungus, Bad Fungus – how fungi have shaped the ancient and modern world
To most people, fungi means mushrooms, and to a few more, yeasts, moulds and mildews. Indeed, fungi are all these, and these organisms, the second largest group outside the bacteria, give us a myriad of essential products from antibiotics to enzymes and food products. Eleven people have won the Nobel Prize for their work on fungi and what these amazing organisms have told us about life on the planet. This has led to a lot of recent interest in the fungi as a group of organisms with fascinating and critical properties.
But beyond the benevolent fungi there is a dark side, and one much less appreciated despite the huge scale of the problem they create. For example, human fungal infections (the field of medical mycology) cause more deaths than malaria, HIV, tuberculosis, breast cancer and prostate cancer, yet the global community of medical mycologists is small, and this area is much less researched compared to those studying bacteria and viruses. The Medical Research Council (MRC) Centre of Medical Mycology at the University of Exeter, is the largest specialist research centre in this field worldwide.
Professor Neil Gow, a co-founder of this centre, and his laboratory focusses on how we can use studies of the outer cell walls of medically important fungi to generate much needed drugs, diagnostics and immune therapies. His talk will explain the amazing but largely hidden world of the “good fungus, bad fungus” biology, guiding a discussion of how fungi have shaped the ancient and modern world.
Professor Neil Gow is current President of the European Confederation of Medical Mycology, an umbrella organisation that coordinates research in medical mycology across twenty six nations.
Following his talk, Professor Gow and his colleagues will share and discuss images of the important fungi they work with at the Medical Research Council Centre for Medical Mycology, including an opportunity to view specimens under microscopes.