Infiltration of Agrobacterium tumefaciens in leaves of Nicotiana benthamiana has become a standard method for transient expression in plants. Like many Solanaceae species, N. benthamiana develops on i...

Root vascular pathogens like Fusarium oxysporum (Fo) severely impact agriculture by colonizing the xylem, thereby disrupting the transport of water...

Fungal diseases are a major threat to global food production, and many crop pathogens are becoming resistant to existing fungicides. This study identifies a promising new strategy to combat these infe...

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Here the authors report a pair of identical effector genes in different fungal pathogens that cause vascular wilt diseases to cause defoliation in crops. Removing these genes stops disease, and mobile...

Fungi are widespread on our planet and essential for life as we know it, but how did they come about? Their last common ancestor lived hundreds of millions of years ago, but its characteristics, and t...

Many natural products can selectively modulate biological processes, making them prime candidates for drug discovery. However, the complexity of biological samples makes clear attribution of activity ...

Microbial Natural Products Meet Data Science. The Zdouc research lab at the University of Vienna investigates naturally occurring, specialized molecules called natural products. These small molecules ...

In this Review, Rillig explores the diversity of fungi in the soil ecosystem, their ecological interactions and diverse ecological roles in terrestrial ecosystems as well as anthropogenic factors that...

Fungal effectors may have evolved from ancient antimicrobials, shaping plant microbiota and immunity during infection.

The rising prevalence of invasive fungal infections, particularly among immunocompromised individuals, has become a critical public health concern. However, antifungal drug development has not kept pace with this growing need, and treatment options remain limited to a small number of drug classes. The emergence of multidrug-resistant fungal pathogens, such as Candida auris, further exacerbates this crisis by reducing the efficacy of existing therapeutics and increasing the risk of treatment failure. In this study, we evaluate the antifungal potential of FK20, a random peptide mixture (RPM) composed of L-phenylalanine and L-lysine. FK20 displays potent activity against C. auris and other clinically relevant Candida species, impairs biofilm formation, and exhibits synergy with caspofungin. Importantly, FK20 limits the emergence of resistance and demonstrates therapeutic efficacy in a murine model of systemic candidiasis. These findings establish RPMs as a promising new class of antifungals with broad-spectrum activity and clinical potential against drug-resistant fungal infections.

This study introduces genome–host association (GHA), leveraging natural epidemics to map the genetic landscape of host adaptation in the pathogen Zymoseptoria tritici. Applied to 832 wheat fungal stra...

Mucosal barriers play critical roles in the interaction with commensal and pathogenic microbes. Here the authors show non-canonical IL-22 signalling results in mucosal remodelling in a murine model du...