Research Projects

• Mucormycosis, or “Black Fungus Disease,” is a severe fungal infection caused by mainly Mucor, Syncephalastrum and other species. It typically spreads through spore inhalation or skin injuries, leading to serious complications with a high mortality rate (23%-80%) in adults. Mucormycosis, affects an estimated 195,000 cases each year in India. There are no specific drugs available and conventional systemic anti-fungal drugs have side effects as well as high mortality rate often reaching 100% in cases with secondary infections. Additionally, Mucorales fungi develop resistance to many antifungal agents, which renders any usable drug redundant. The natural habitat in which these fungi occur can be a fruitful arena for the search for microbes which can inhibit these fungi. As these fungi are also entomopathogens, the evolutionary ‘arm’s race’, could have already selected microbes capable of countering these fungi. The mounds of the fungus-growing termite, Odontotermes obesus, is precisely such a habitat which has over 1045 unique genera of bacteria and 418 genera of fungi. We have found several strains of Mucor, Syncephalstrum and many bacteria that can prevent these fungi in culture. • The goal of this proposal is to utilize these bacteria to find what is the genetic toolkit for the suppression of these fungi. Conversely, the proposal also aims to identify the fungal genetic pathways that these bacteria target so that a robust genetic target can be identified to prevent these fungi. • The proposal aims to grow these microbes in a liquid co-culture, follows their growth with qPCR, and aims to find a precise and repeatable temporal window within which to extract the RNA to sequence this meta-transcriptome. When compared with the controls, the proposal aims to identify the fungal genes, and their underlying biochemical pathways, that are targeted by the bacteria to elicit fungal suppression. Conversely, using the same transcriptome data, but with the addition of whole bacterial genome sequencing, the proposal also aims to identify the bacterial genes that are over-expressed to cause this fungal suppression. This would enable researchers to eventually clone these genes to find their products and design efficient anti-fungal drugs. • If the goals of this proposal are fulfilled then it has the dual benefit of furthering basic science as well as opening up new vistas for scientific application. The genetic basis of fungal inhibition by bacteria is a little-known field and will broaden our understanding of how the evolutionary ‘arm’s race’ between these two ubiquitous microbes shape the vast majority of our ecosystems. However, the immediate benefit would be in applied biotechnology and medical pharmacology as knowing the genetic targets of fungal inhibition will open up new avenues of medical application geared towards anti-fungal treatment.