Emerging fungal diseases: understanding their emergence to combat the threat

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Gerald Kerth, since 1/2019
• Subject Area: Evolution, Anthropology ; Evolution and Systematics of Plants and Fungi
• Term: from 2018 to 2023
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 396686709

Emerging infectious diseases are a severe conservation threat for a variety of plants and animals. Among them, an unprecedented number of fungal diseases have recently caused some of the most severe die-offs and extinctions ever witnessed in wild species. They pose difficult challenges to conservation because of their typically rapid and unexpected onset combined with high mortality rates. This increase in dangerousness of fungi seems related to human activities and particularly the transport of different species of fungi to places they had never been before, leading to major disease outbreaks in naive hosts. These introductions followed by disease emergence offer great opportunities to concomitantly answer fundamental questions in evolutionary biology and provide critical information to inform and thus drive the management of these diseases. We propose here to use the White-Nose Syndrome as a case study. In North America, several species of bats are being threatened by the White-Nose Syndrome, a disease that has caused unprecedented mass mortality of >6 million hibernating bats since 2006. The fungus Pseudogymnoascus destructans (Pd), the causative agent of the disease, has only recently been confirmed to be an introduced species from Europe where the species is native and does not cause mass mortality in bats. Combining a large genomic dataset of isolates collected across the species native range in Europe and state-of the art analyses, we aim to better understand population structure and evolutionary processes occurring in the native range of the pathogen and during the recent invasion of North America. Hence the first objective of the project is to identify the factors affecting the population structure of Pd in its native European range and to develop models to make predictions about the effect of climate change on the fungus population structure and the possible emergence of virulent strains via sexual reproduction. The second objective is to elucidate the location of the source population in Europe and the timing of introduction to North America, and investigate if any adaptive genetic changes occurred between the introduction time and the emergence time supporting in situ local adaptation. The last objective is to investigate the genetic basis and architecture of local adaptation and more particularly thermal adaptation in different parts of the species native range. By achieving these three objectives, this project will not only uncover the evolutionary history of Pd in Europe but also get further insights into the emergence of pathogens.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• International Connection: United Kingdom
• Cooperation Partner: Michael Bekaert, Ph.D.
• Ehemaliger Antragsteller: Sébastien Puechmaille, Ph.D., until 12/2018