What is it about?
Every year, fungal pathogens destroy more than 10% of the world’s major crops, threatening global food security, biodiversity, and farmers’ livelihoods. It’s a silent crisis that costs billions and fuels the overuse of chemical fungicides. While fungi play vital roles in healthy soils and ecosystems, some species can devastate agriculture, and scientists still know surprisingly little about how they coordinate infection.
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Photo by Aleksandr Malofeev on Unsplash
Why is it important?
If we can understand how fungi “talk” to each other at the molecular level, we can start designing eco-friendly antifungal strategies that protect crops without relying on harmful chemicals. To do that, we have developed a new synthetic biology tool called Yeast Mating Platform (YeMaP). YeMaP uses the natural mating system of Saccharomyces cerevisiae (baker’s yeast) to study fungal G protein-coupled receptors (GPCRs), a class of receptors that can mediate plant perception and coordinate virulence. The study revealed that supplementation with GPCR-targeting peptides, resulting from screening with YeMaP, could interfere with cell-cell communication during virulence of the phytopathogenic fungus, Fusarium oxysporum, to reduce penetration in tomato roots. This demonstration shows that YeMaP is a reliable experimental model of fungal GPCR-ligand interactions.
Perspectives
This approach helps us to understand fungal communication mediated by GPCRs and opens the door to designing more targeted, sustainable ways of protecting crops. In particular, interfering with GPCR-mediated cell–cell communication is a promising target for antifungal strategies in agriculture.
Giovanni Schiesaro
Technical University of Denmark
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: A yeast mating platform for multiplex screening of fungal GPCR–ligand interactions, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, October 2025, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences,
DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2521198122.
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