Can bioimaging build capacity in fungi research?

Fungi are beautiful and very charismatic. The most fascinating thing about them is that they’re incredibly adaptable.

These ancient organisms are experts at colonising new and challenging locations. Parts of Chernobyl are covered in black fungus because it’s the only thing that can grow there. There are fungi growing on the space station, at the bottom of the ocean, and in our bodies.

As the climate and our environments change, fungi will take advantage. One of the newest fungi to cause human disease is Candida auris, which is well-adapted to grow on plastic. It can create colonies on the microplastics in our oceans, in our water and in our environments. It’s becoming a pathogen because it sticks to catheters and other plastics used in hospitals.

We need to start thinking about fungi in the same way we think about microbes. There are very few medications in our antifungal arsenal and even these are beginning to fail. Antifungal resistance is as big an issue as antibiotic resistance. The problem is, there are many fungal pathogens we don’t know anything about – how they grow, what their cell walls are made of or their replication rates.

To tackle this challenge, we need to build capacity in fungal research. We need to increase access to the right tools, so researchers around the world can ask questions specific to their settings. That’s what we’re trying to address through our Wellcome bioimaging grant.

I’m a cell biologist. I love looking at things. So, from my perspective, bioimaging is the most exciting thing you can do. I think it can change the public perception of fungi. They have gorgeous morphologies and they grow in ways we can observe over the course of a day.

Our work involves leveraging fluorescent reporters, which are proteins that glow. It’s similar to the way fireflies can turn on luciferase to send signals. We use them to put coloured tags on specific parts of the cell and link them to events. So, when the cell does something, it lights up. We can use this to get information about the cell’s behaviour, or to identify objects that would otherwise be very hard to see. This is an essential tool to understand life.

Bioimaging tools can be used in diagnostics as well as research.

My recent paper explores using fluorescent reporters in diagnosing fungal infections. During infection, the fungus sheds a molecule that we can detect using a lateral flow device, like you would with covid. But we didn’t know where this molecule was on the fungus. We put a fluorescently labelled antibody on the molecule to see where it was on the fungal cell surface, which allows us to differentiate that infection from other fungal infections which require different treatment.

Until now, this powerful technique hasn’t been developed for pathogens in the fungal kingdom. We’re excited by the potential to move these tools into this huge, unknown area of research.

Through our bioimaging grant, we want to make this technology accessible to any scientist working on fungal infections. In resource-limited settings, tool development is a low priority because it’s time-consuming, it’s costly, and there’s a lot of failure before it works.

If you’re in a life-or-death situation – which is the case with fungal infections in extremely resource-limited settings – you're not going to ask what the organism looks like under a microscope. We’re trying to reduce that barrier by making it easier to study these organisms.

We’re working with Cape Town University to develop a toolbox which anyone can get. We’ll disseminate it either at cost or for free to researchers in low-resource settings, subsidised through grants or selling the tools to researchers with more resources.

We’ll then host training workshops in collaboration with the Africa Microscopy Initiative (AMI). We’re inviting scientists from across Africa, from communities affected by fungal diseases, to attend the workshops. We’ll train them in these techniques and then hope to follow it up with further scientist-led workshops in collaboration with AMI.

It’s about capacity building, not information delivery. We want to enable scientists to carry out their own fungal research and ask the questions they want answered. I know what I'm curious about, but clinicians in resource-limited settings will have different questions that are more important to their work. We hope this approach will enable and inspire their research.

These days I’m a complete devotee, but I was in grad school before I even knew about fungal research. There are many reasons why fungal infections are under-researched.

Some fungal infections are so destructive that people immediately die, so there are few or no patient advocacy groups for these diseases. Other fungal infections are considered superficial. For example, yeast infections are seen as a women’s problem, and patients are told to wait and see if it gets better.

Fungal infections also primarily affect people in low- and middle-income countries, where there may not be the funding or resources to work on answering these questions.

And fungi are seen as gross. People think about mould as something that grows in their bathroom that they put bleach on. That’s where bioimaging can come in to show that fungi are a huge kingdom of beautiful, complex organisms.

We’re a community of researchers working on all these problems together, and we need to advocate for each other. We’re working with a global network to change the narrative around fungal infections.

This article was first published in 'Behind the Research', our LinkedIn newsletter sharing insights and stories from experts in global health research.