Fungi chemistry aims at greener crop protection

Fungi are already part of crop protection. Farmers use some species as biocontrols because they can suppress insect pests and plant pathogens without looking like classic synthetic pesticides. But the frustrating part has been simple — people knew these fungi worked, yet often did not know which molecules were doing the work. (nature.com) A paper published online on April 16 in *Nature Chemical Biology* starts to fix that by mapping the hidden chemistry of a big fungal group called Hypocreales. (research-portal.uu.nl) ### What are these fungi, exactly? Hypocreales is an order of fungi that includes species already used in agriculture and biological pest control. Some live around roots, some live inside plants, and some attack insects directly. (orbit.dtu.dk) That makes them unusually interesting — they are not just passive microbes in the soil, but chemical factories that can help plants fend off attackers. ### What did the new study actually do? The team combined phylogenomics, metabolomics, and heterologous expression to survey 82 plant-associated and insect-associated Hypocreales species. In plain English, they looked at fungal genomes for chemical-making instructions, checked which molecules the fungi were actually producing, and then matched genes to compounds. (nature.com) That is the important jump here — not just cataloging DNA, but connecting DNA to usable chemistry. ### What did they find? A lot. The researchers annotated 5,221 biosynthetic gene clusters — the DNA packages that encode pathways for making natural products. Roughly 80% appeared to encode unknown products, which means most of this chemical space has not been described before. (orbit.dtu.dk) They also assigned putative products to 1,034 clusters and worked out biosynthetic pathways for four previously unknown NRPS-like systems. ### Why is that a big deal for farming? Because crop protection has a specificity problem. Conventional pesticides can work well, but many are broad-spectrum, so they hit more than the intended target and can create pressure for resistance. (orbit.dtu.dk) Fungal metabolites offer a different starting point — molecules shaped by evolution to compete with insects, pathogens, and rival microbes in very specific ecological settings. That does not automatically make them safe or field-ready, but it does make them promising leads for narrower, more selective crop-protection tools. ### Why were these compounds hidden before? Fungi are notorious for keeping useful chemistry turned off in the lab. A gene cluster can sit in the genome like a recipe in a drawer — real, but not expressed under standard growth conditions. (research-portal.uu.nl) The team tried to get around that by growing each species under four cultivation conditions and pairing that with genome mining, which increased the odds of catching rare metabolites. ### Are we talking about products soon? Probably not immediately. This is a platform study more than a launch announcement. The paper gives researchers a map — which fungal lineages carry which chemical machinery, and which clusters are worth testing next. (phys.org) Turning that into a commercial biopesticide still means proving efficacy, scaling production, checking stability in the field, and making sure non-target effects stay low. That part can take years. ### So what changed this week? Basically, the field moved from “these fungi seem useful” to “here is a large, structured inventory of the chemistry that may explain why.” That is a big difference. Once you know the molecules and the genes behind them, you can screen faster, engineer production, and stop treating fungal biocontrol as a black box. (cen.acs.org) ### Bottom line? This is not the end of synthetic pesticides. But it is a credible step toward crop protection built from biological chemistry instead of brute-force spraying — and the newly mapped fungal toolbox looks much bigger than researchers realized. (nature.com) (communities.springernature.com)