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Fungal impacts on Earth’s ecosystems

Nature volume 638, pages 49–57 (2025)Cite this article

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Abstract

Over the past billion years, the fungal kingdom has diversified to more than two million species, with over 95% still undescribed. Beyond the well-known macroscopic mushrooms and microscopic yeast, fungi are heterotrophs that feed on almost any organic carbon, recycling nutrients through the decay of dead plants and animals and sequestering carbon into Earth’s ecosystems. Human-directed applications of fungi extend from leavened bread, alcoholic beverages and biofuels to pharmaceuticals, including antibiotics and psychoactive compounds. Conversely, fungal infections pose risks to ecosystems ranging from crops to wildlife to humans; these risks are driven, in part, by human and animal movement, and might be accelerating with climate change. Genomic surveys are expanding our knowledge of the true biodiversity of the fungal kingdom, and genome-editing tools make it possible to imagine harnessing these organisms to fuel the bioeconomy. Here, we examine the fungal threats facing civilization and investigate opportunities to use fungi to combat these threats.

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Fig. 1: Climate change will disrupt fungal interactions in Earth’s ecosystems and is likely to increase fungal diseases in plants, wildlife and humans.
Fig. 2: Control strategies to combat fungal infections.
Fig. 3: The fungal kingdom offers many known and emerging solutions to global challenges facing humanity.

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Acknowledgements

N.T.C. is supported by a Canadian Institutes for Health Research (CIHR) Canada Graduate Scholarships Doctoral Award. A. Casadevall was supported by National Institutes of Health (NIH) grants AI052733-16, AI152078-01 and HL059842-19. C.R.C. was supported by the Jarislowsky Foundation. L.K.F.-L., T.Y.J. and J.E.S. are supported by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation award 9337 (10.37807/GBMF9337). A.G. is supported by an NIH–NIAID K99 grant 1K99AI166094-01. I.D.I. is supported by NIH grants DK113136, DK121977 and AI163007. H.J. was supported by grants from the NIH (R35GM136379), National Science Foundation (NSF) (IOS 2020731), US Department of Agriculture (2021-67013-34258) and Australian Research Council Research Hub for Sustainable Crop Protection (IH190100022). B.S.K. is supported by grants R01 AI168370, R37 AI035681, R01 AI040996, U01 AI124299, NSF 2301729, T32 AI055397 and BAA-NIAID-DAIT-AI201800007. R.S.S. is supported by a Tier II Canada Research Chair. K.G.P. is supported by NSF DEB 1845544 and DOE BER DE-SC0023661. J.E.S. was supported by NSF grant EF-2125066, NIH–NIAID grants AI127548 AI130128 and US Department of Agriculture, National Institute of Food and Agriculture Hatch Projects CA-R-PPA-211-5062-H. L.E.C. is a Canada Research Chair (Tier 1) in Microbial Genomics and Infectious Disease and is supported by a CIHR Foundation grant (FDN-154288) and NIH grants R01 AI127375, R01 AI162789 and R01AI165466. J.H. is supported by NIH grants R01 AI039115, R01 AI050113, R01 AI170543, R01 AI172451, R01 AI133654 and R21 AI168672. J.A.S. is supported by the Intramural Research Program of the National Human Genome Research Institute. I.V.E., A.C.G., A.G., K.S.O., R.S.S. and N.S. are CIFAR Azrieli Global Scholars of the CIFAR Fungal Kingdom: Threats & Opportunities program. S.J.G., M.C.F., D.S.B., C.B., A. Chowdhary, C.A.C., C.R.C., L.K.F.-L., I.D.I., T.Y.J., H.J., B.S.K., J.W.K., K.G.P., D.C.S., J.E.S., E.H.S., G.D.W. and J.A.S. are Fellows of the CIFAR Fungal Kingdom: Threats & Opportunities program. A. Casadevall, D.W.D., N.A.R.G., R.K. and J.W.T. are advisors of the CIFAR Fungal Kingdom: Threats & Opportunities program. J.H. and L.E.C. are co-directors of the CIFAR Fungal Kingdom: Threats & Opportunities program. Any use of trade, firm or product names is for descriptive purposes only and does not imply endorsement by the US government.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Molecular Genetics, University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario, Canada

    Nicola T. Case, Charles Boone & Leah E. Cowen

  2. Biosciences, University of Exeter, Exeter, UK

    Sarah J. Gurr

  3. University of Utrecht, Utrecht, The Netherlands

    Sarah J. Gurr

  4. MRC Center for Global Infectious Disease Analysis, Imperial College London, London, UK

    Matthew C. Fisher

  5. National Wildlife Health Center, U.S. Geological Survey, Madison, WI, USA

    David S. Blehert

  6. Donnelly Centre, University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario, Canada

    Charles Boone

  7. RIKEN Center for Sustainable Resource Science, Wako, Japan

    Charles Boone

  8. Department of Molecular Microbiology and Immunology, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD, USA

    Arturo Casadevall

  9. Medical Mycology Unit, Department of Microbiology, Vallabhbhai Patel Chest Institute, University of Delhi, Delhi, India

    Anuradha Chowdhary

  10. National Reference Laboratory for Antimicrobial Resistance in Fungal Pathogens, Vallabhbhai Patel Chest Institute, University of Delhi, Delhi, India

    Anuradha Chowdhary

  11. Department of Molecular Microbiology and Immunology, Brown University, Providence, RI, USA

    Christina A. Cuomo

  12. Department of Biochemistry and Biomedical Sciences, McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada

    Cameron R. Currie

  13. Department of Bacteriology, University of Wisconsin–Madison, Madison, WI, USA

    Cameron R. Currie

  14. Manchester Fungal Infection Group, Faculty of Biology, Medicine and Health, Manchester Academic Health Science Centre, University of Manchester, Manchester, UK

    David W. Denning

  15. Fungal Heterogeneity Group, Institut Pasteur, Université Paris Cité, Paris, France

    Iuliana V. Ene

  16. Department of Biology, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA, USA

    Lillian K. Fritz-Laylin

  17. Department of Microbiology, University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada

    Aleeza C. Gerstein

  18. Department of Statistics, University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada

    Aleeza C. Gerstein

  19. Medical Research Council Centre for Medical Mycology, University of Exeter, Exeter, UK

    Neil A. R. Gow

  20. Department of Molecular Genetics and Microbiology, Duke University, Durham, NC, USA

    Asiya Gusa & Joseph Heitman

  21. Joan and Sanford I. Weill Department of Medicine, Weill Cornell Medicine, Cornell University, New York, NY, USA

    Iliyan D. Iliev

  22. Jill Roberts Institute for Research in Inflammatory Bowel Disease, Weill Cornell Medicine, New York, NY, USA

    Iliyan D. Iliev

  23. Immunology and Microbial Pathogenesis Program, Weill Cornell Graduate School of Medical Sciences, Weill Cornell Medicine, Cornell University, New York, NY, USA

    Iliyan D. Iliev

  24. Department of Microbiology and Immunology, Weill Cornell Medicine, Cornell University, New York, NY, USA

    Iliyan D. Iliev

  25. Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, USA

    Timothy Y. James

  26. Department of Microbiology and Plant Pathology, Center for Plant Cell Biology, Institute for Integrative Genome Biology, University of California, Riverside, Riverside, CA, USA

    Hailing Jin & Jason E. Stajich

  27. Max Planck Institute for Terrestrial Microbiology, Marburg, Germany

    Regine Kahmann

  28. Departments of Pediatrics, Medicine and Medical Microbiology and Immunology, University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health, Madison, WI, USA

    Bruce S. Klein

  29. Michael Smith Laboratories, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada

    James W. Kronstad

  30. Department of Immunology and Microbiology, University of Colorado Anschutz School of Medicine, Aurora, CO, USA

    Kyla S. Ost

  31. Departments of Biology and Earth System Science, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA

    Kabir G. Peay

  32. Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology, University of Guelph, Guelph, Ontario, Canada

    Rebecca S. Shapiro

  33. Departments of Medicine and Microbiology and Immunology, McGill University, Montreal, Quebec, Canada

    Donald C. Sheppard

  34. Koret School of Veterinary Medicine, Robert H. Smith Faculty of Agriculture, Food and Environment, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Rehovot, Israel

    Neta Shlezinger

  35. Christian Albrecht University of Kiel and Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Biology, Plön, Germany

    Eva H. Stukenbrock

  36. Department of Plant and Microbial Biology, University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, CA, USA

    John W. Taylor

  37. M. G. DeGroote Institute for Infectious Disease Research, Department of Biochemistry and Biomedical Sciences, McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada

    Gerard D. Wright

  38. Microbial Genomics Section, National Human Genome Research Institute, NIH, Bethesda, MD, USA

    Julia A. Segre

Authors
  1. Nicola T. Case
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  2. Sarah J. Gurr
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Contributions

N.T.C., S.J.G., M.C.F., D.S.B., C.B., A. Casadevall, A. Chowdhary, C.A.C., C.R.C., D.W.D., I.V.E., L.K.F.-L., A.C.G., N.A.R.G., A.G., I.D.I., T.Y.J., H.J., R.K., B.S.K., J.W.K., K.S.O., K.G.P., R.S.S., D.C.S., N.S., J.E.S., E.H.S., J.W.T., G.D.W., L.E.C., J.H. and J.A.S. conceived, drafted and revised this work. I.V.E., A.C.G., A.G., K.S.O., R.S.S. and N.S. conceptualized and drafted the figures.

Corresponding authors

Correspondence to Leah E. Cowen, Joseph Heitman or Julia A. Segre.

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Competing interests

D.W.D. and family hold founder shares in F2G, a University of Manchester spin-out antifungal discovery company, and share options in TFF Pharma. D.W.D. acts or has recently acted as a consultant to Pulmatrix, Pulmocide, Biosergen, TFF Pharmaceuticals, Pfizer, Omega, Novacyt, Rostra Therapeutics, MucPharm, Mundipharma, Lifemine and Cipla; chairs a Data Review Committee for Pulmocide; and acts as a Phase 1 Medical Monitor for Biosergen. In the past three years, D.W.D. has been paid for talks on behalf of BioRad, Basilea and Pfizer. J.E.S. is a paid consultant for Zymergen, Sincarne and Michroma. L.E.C. is a co-founder of and shareholder in Bright Angel Therapeutics, a platform company for the development of novel antifungal therapeutics, and a Science Advisor for Kapoose Creek, a company that harnesses the therapeutic potential of fungi.

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Case, N.T., Gurr, S.J., Fisher, M.C. et al. Fungal impacts on Earth’s ecosystems. Nature 638, 49–57 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-024-08419-4

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