Reflections from the 2024 Mycological Society of America Annual Meeting
BY BRANDEN WALLE, DIRECTOR OF BIOLOGY, KAPOOSE CREEK BIO
A s a mycologist, I study the fascinating world of fungi, one of the most diverse and prolific kingdoms of life on earth. Among their many contributions, fungi have enabled the development of game changing medicines, from penicillin and cholesterol-lowering statins to immune modulating cyclosporin. Having attended this year’s Mycological Society of America’s (MSA) meeting, an annual opportunity to hear from experts on the latest science, I was struck by the breadth and depth of topics discussed, and the speed at which the field is advancing. I began to wonder: could the next generation of medicines from fungi yield even more transformative medicines than the last? Here is what I learned from several renowned mycologists at the meeting, and why I believe the potential of fungi in modern medicine has never been greater.
New initiatives to chart the unknown diversity of fungal species are rapidly advancing
It is no secret that the genetic diversity of the fungal kingdom and abundance of species still remain uncharted and immense; some experts estimate that more than 90 percent of the world’s fungi remain unknown to science. But, at least in the case of macrofungi, this is rapidly changing. At the MSA meeting, lectures by Dr. Alfredo Justo1 and Dr. Stephen Russell2 highlighted several initiatives to chart the unknown map of fungal species in North America. These include the Mycoflora Project, aimed at creating a free web-based tool with descriptions, pictures, DNA barcodes and habitat information for all North American fungi; and the ongoing Continental MycoBlitz, a crowdsource community science-based effort to catalogue as many fungal species as possible from the entire continent. These projects, which mirror similar efforts in Europe, are already yielding tremendous results. When launched just a few short years ago, almost a third of macrofungal sequences were novel to science. Today, the average number of novel sequences is one in seven. Understanding the genetic diversity of fungi informs the related chemical diversity, which in turn underscores the huge promise of macrofungi for natural product drug discovery.
At Kapoose Creek Bio, we too are making significant strides in this area, and have built a one-of-a-kind fungal culture collection, a dried fungarium and an ever-growing fractionated library. Our collection currently consists of over 5,000 strains of fungi with as much as thirty percent of our library having no publicly available species match. The potential for new discoveries is high.
Experts agree: the wealth of fungal ‘secondary metabolites’ hints at the vast potential of these organisms in the discovery of small molecule drugs
Fungi are known to produce huge numbers of secondary metabolites, molecules that exhibit a wide range of biological effects. While many of the best-known fungal metabolites achieved notoriety for their toxic effects – either associated with food contamination, such as aflatoxin B; poisonings from misidentification of edible fungi, such as the deadly amatoxins; or as classic hallucinogens, such as psilocybin – other fungi have thousands of years of traditional medicinal use, and modern science has shown some of these to have metabolites with valuable bioactivities such as cholesterol lowering, neuroprotective, immunosuppressive and anticancer properties.
Dr. Nancy P. Keller’s lecture3 at the MSA meeting elaborated on the important role of secondary metabolites in fungi. She also reinforced that modern, technical advances in molecular genetics, computational and chemical analyses now allow laboratories worldwide to access biosynthetic gene clusters and their products. My takeaway: the abundance of biologically active secondary metabolites in fungi, coupled with the diversity of uncharted fungal species – and the recent advances in technology – all point to a nearly limitless potential for drug discovery from this kingdom of life.
Overall, this year’s MSA meeting reinforced the excitement around the immense potential of fungi in medicine. I left the gathering even more optimistic about the work being done at Kapoose Creek Bio to advance our diverse fungal collection – which has already identified potent compounds in depression and neurodegeneration. I am looking forward to being a part of what is next!
- Justo, A. The Pluteus Nanus Complex In North America: High Species Diversity and Regional Endemism. Proceedings of the Mycological Society of America 2024, Markham, Canada, June 9-12, 2024
- Russell, S. The Continental Mycoblitz – Year One Progress. Proceedings of the Mycological Society of America 2024, Markham, Canada, June 9-12, 2024
- Keller, N. P. Secondary Metabolites: Armaments, Shields and Enigmatic Languages of Fungi. Proceedings of the Mycological Society of America 2024, Markham, Canada, June 9-12, 2024
