Welcome to Fungal Biology and Biotechnology
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EDITORIAL
Open Access
Welcome to Fungal Biology and Biotechnology Alexander Idnurm1* and Vera Meyer2* Fungi are fundamental and predominant influences in our lives. These species impact us in diverse ways, such as generating the food we eat and drink, providing life-saving pharmaceutical agents, and are sources of enzymes; and yet they adversely affect the structural integrity of our buildings, poison us, cause common mycoses and in not so rare cases can kill us, and they are the principal group of microbes responsible for plant diseases that threaten global food security [1,2]. While fungi are described as “microbes”, this term may conjure images of a bacterium like Escherichia coli growing as a colony in a petri dish culture or as a microscopic rod. Some fungi do grow in an equivalent manner, yet many others have intricate developmental forms and in relative size some are best appreciated at the scale achieved from an airplane rather than at electron microscope resolution [3,4]. Not surprisingly given their importance to humans, some species of fungi have been studied extensively. For instance, the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae and its close relatives are used in baking and brewing: S. cerevisiae was the first eukaryote with a genome sequence and became the premier model species to understand large parts of eukaryotic molecular biology. However, the realm of fungal biology is far vaster and almost entirely unexplored beyond a handful of model species, with some estimates of up to 5 million fungal species on the planet [5]. The reduction in DNA sequencing costs and the implementation of functional studies through gene manipulations are allowing hitherto unexplored fungi to reveal insights into their biology, at a level that would have been barely dreamed of for the model species less than a decade ago. This is a new golden age of discovery in the fungi, and an exciting time to take part of this adventure and then describe these discoveries for future generations. While our appreciation of fungi grows daily, the communication of this new found knowledge has become scattered across the publishing world. The journals * Correspondence: [email protected]; [email protected] 1 School of Botany, University of Melbourne, Melbourne, VIC 3010, Australia 2 Institute of Biotechnology, Berlin University of Technology, Berlin 13355, Germany
dedicated to mycology tend to focus on specific aspects of their biology. Journals dedicated to fungal biotechnology do not exist. Furthermore, major changes have occurred in the last decade in how journals are organized and in requirements of funding agencies to make data accessible to the general public funding the research. Data have changed from being presented in print form to cases being best visualized online as large datasets, videos, or three-dimensional images. The availability of internet resources has shifted philosophy to include and rely more on online supplemental material. Another trend is the way in which information is sought and identified – gone is
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