Removing Barriers to Fungal Bioimaging for the Global Medical Mycology Community

Human fungal pathogens cause 2.5 million deaths each year, primarily in low and middle income (LMIC) countries. The WHO identified 20 Priority Fungal Pathogens requiring urgent fundamental research.

Advanced bioimaging is crucial to achieving this agenda by enabling dynamic, live, quantitative, single-cell analysis in infection contexts.

Yet molecular, technological, analytical and expertise barriers inherent in fungal systems prevent the global medical mycology community from applying major new bioimaging advances.

Leveraging an international collaborative team including medical mycologists, engineering biologists, and imaging experts from the Universities of Exeter, Cape Town, and Edinburgh, we will address these barriers in three aims: 1) A Pan-fungal molecular bioimaging toolbox; 2) Bespoke, affordable, single cell imaging chambers; and 3) Robust high-throughput image analysis pipelines, underpinned by advanced training of LMIC researchers.

The foundation phase will deliver stakeholder consolidation and proof-of-principle development in three emerging fungal pathogens: Candida glabrata, Rhizopus microsporus, and Emergomyces africanus.

The scale-up phase will broaden access to advanced bioimaging tools across fungal pathogens and build fungal bioimaging expertise in Africa.

Addressing these barriers simultaneously and ensuring uptake by LMIC scientists will propel the medical mycology community to the forefront of modern bioimaging, enabling insight into basic biology and antifungal resistance mechanisms.