Abstract

The 2020 Gordon Research Conference on Cellular and Molecular Fungal Biology will focus on the huge diversity of fungal lifestyles and the mechanisms through which they interact with the complex environments they occupy. Fungal diversity reflects the evolutionary pressures and environmental challenges faced by all living organisms as they compete for resources. It presents rich opportunities to discover and characterize divergent mechanistic solutions for survival, thereby advancing our understanding of biology as a whole. These solutions include symbiotic and pathogenic lifestyles, which we must understand in order to safeguard the environment and combat diseases that threaten food crops, wildlife, livestock and human welfare. This conference will provide a deeper knowledge of the cell biology of fungi and the mechanisms they use to both support and extinguish other life-forms. This understanding will help us to devise interventions and to exploit fungal diversity in the development of therapeutics and biotechnology applications. The conference will bring together researchers from across the globe and spanning all career stages to present and discuss the latest exciting findings on fungal cell and molecular biology in evolution, development, growth, complex communities and pathogenicity. We will explore environmental sensing, signaling, morphology and emerging concepts in eukaryotic cell biology, as well as the synthetic design and commercial exploitation of fungal systems.