In World War 2, the “wonder drug” penicillin saved the lives of an estimated 15% — quite literally, millions — of Allied soldiers, who would otherwise have died of sepsis, infections, pneumonia and meningitis.
That the widespread availability of penicillin helped the Allies to gain an advantage and win the war is not an understatement. By comparison, Nazi Germany treated its wounded and sick with sulfonamides (sulfa drugs), which were less potent and associated with allergic reactions and bacterial resistance. Penicillin simply saved more Allied lives and got soldiers back into combat quicker.
While the Scottish physician Alexander Fleming had famously extracted a crude form of penicillin from the Penicillium fungus in 1928, it took another 15 years before scientists managed to mass-produce its purified form, so that it could have the game-changing battlefield impact it eventually did. It might have taken even longer, but for the urgency of the war.
Penicillin is, of course, the most famous example of the huge potential of fungi, such as Penicillium. But our understanding of fungi and what they do (for better or worse) is actually very limited. We don’t, for example, know exactly how many fungal species there are, but, using plant biodiversity as a proxy, South Africa is considered one of the world’s fungal hotspots, with an estimated 200,000 of the roughly 2.5-million species worldwide thought to occur here.
When you consider that only 155,000 species have been discovered, cultured, named and described worldwide to date, and that we don’t know yet what most of them do, the true scale of the work that remains becomes clearer.
Now is the time for South Africa, in particular, to step forward in the quest to better understand fungi. Not only does our status as a global biodiversity hotspot make us the ideal place for such research, we’re on the cusp of technological changes that allow us to do so much more, so much quicker and cost-effectively than before.
So-called “helicopter science” — when overseas researchers come here and do their work but we benefit unevenly — is also a concern. If we don’t do this work for ourselves and put ourselves at the global forefront of research, South Africa and Africa will be left behind. It is thus the perfect moment for us to record much more of our own biodiversity and, in turn, make a huge contribution to international biodiversity.
So what are we doing?
At the University of Pretoria’s Forestry and Agricultural Biotechnology Institute (Fabi), where I work, we’re launching a project called Mapping Unseen Fungi Across South Africa (Mufasa), which will seek to find, culture, describe, name and whole genome sequence hundreds of novel fungal species, providing science with a vital new resource for research.
One of the big outcomes of this project will be the building of a culture collection of species from South Africa. We need to catalogue these strains before we can study them and take research into fungi and their function forward.
Vital to our work is the Oppenheimer Memorial Trust’s New Frontiers Research Award for 2026, which entails a R7.5m research grant over five years. This prestigious award responds to a need to bolster South Africa’s global reputation for research excellence, and attract and retain early- to mid-career researchers who will build diverse, high-performance research teams, foster collaboration and strengthen South African academia.
Mufasa will also link with two existing projects for which Fabi has funding: the “MycoBiomics” Horizon 2020 Europe’s Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA) staff exchange grant with the EU, which explores how fungi can be used to benefit our bioeconomies, and the Wellcome Trust-funded “CryptoADAPT” project that focuses on Cryptococcus, which is probably the most important — and lethal — fungal pathogen across the world, which causes specific forms of meningitis, pneumonia and other illnesses (and is believed to have had its origins in Southern Africa).
In addition, Fabi’s research is in forestry and agriculture, and fungi have the potential to harness biocontrol rather than chemicals to control pests and diseases, as well as to reduce the use of phosphates for fertilisers and improve crop yields, leading to healthier soils and a greater focus on conservation agriculture.
Traditional processes with latest tech
Because groundbreaking research cannot realistically be done in isolation, Mufasa is also partnering with academics from all over the world, including the US, UK, Germany, Canada, Denmark, the Netherlands and the Czech Republic. We need a team to make this work.
Mufasa’s approach will be novel, combining both traditional processes and up-to-the-minute technologies that will complement and support each other, resulting in much faster, more cost-effective and more accurate research.
On the one hand, we will employ longstanding methods such as culturing (growing fungi in the laboratory), morphology (studying the form and structure of fungi), DNA-barcoding (for their identification) and taxonomy (naming, describing and classifying fungi). These processes are typically laborious, slow and very expensive.
On the other, we will use metabarcoding (a high-throughput sequencing technique) to simultaneously identify all species within a sample using bioinformatics (a field that merges biology with computer science, statistics and mathematics to analyse and interpret large-scale biological data).
Along with our own sample collections, primarily from leaf litter and soil, Mufasa will also incorporate a citizen science approach to both maximise our fieldwork — the collection of samples — and create greater awareness of fungi and other microbes.
We will collaborate with mycologists in all nine provinces, who will approach schools and get learners to also collect samples. Any new fungal species we identify from those samples will be named after the learners who collected the sample.
It’s a fact that our world would not be able to function like it does without fungi, without moulds, yeasts and mushrooms, among many forms. Fungi decompose waste and turn it into nutrients for nearly all plants, for example. Similarly, fungi are vital for food processing such as fermentation, baking and cheese production. They’re also used to degrade hazardous waste, clean up contaminated soil and water, and in myriad other ways.
By increasing global knowledge of fungi, we will be laying the foundations for so many more major scientific advancements. For example, we will be able to explore potential novel chemistry (including new medicines to fight illnesses and/or cancer); bolster agriculture through biocontrol; create sustainable foods such as myco-proteins as an alternative to livestock farming; or produce eco-friendly materials for clothing and packaging.
It’s up to us to learn as much as we can about the fungal species in South Africa and how we can use them to create a brighter future and a better world. Who knows, we may even discover something as exciting and transformative as penicillin.
● Prof Visagie is an associate professor at the Forestry and Agriculture Biotechnology Institute, which is linked to the department of biochemistry, genetics and microbiology at the University of Pretoria. While he had studied microbiology with the intention of pursuing a career in the brewing industry, as a postgraduate student he was introduced to the fascinating world of mycology and taxonomy, and has never looked back.
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