University of Exeter studies imaging of fungal diseases

01 Apr 2026

Funding from Wellcome Trust will support new bioimaging tools to fight lethal pathogens.

A project led by the University of Exeter has been awarded £4.5 million to help improve understanding of fungal diseases that kill more than two million people each year.

The funding from the Wellcome Trust will support development of bioimaging tools to visualise the fundamental biology of microscopic fungal pathogens, and provide training for researchers at the forefront of fighting these diseases.

Fungal pathogens infect 6.5 million people each year, according to the Exeter team, but very little is known about how they cause disease. New fungal pathogens have also repeatedly emerged over the last two decades, meaning scientists urgently need fundamental research to allow improved diagnostics and help identify new drug targets.

Project partners, including Exeter, the University of Edinburgh and the University of Cape Town, are all part of the Mycology Bioimaging Initiative, an international collaboration of researchers working to understand pathogenic fungi.

The six-and-a-half year effort will focus on particular fungal species identified by the World Health Organization on its fungal priority pathogens list. This was created by the WHO to focus and drive further research and policy interventions, strengthening the global response to fungal infections and antifungal resistance.

"Fungi cause disease through the act of growing," commented Elizabeth Ballou from Exeter’s Medical Research Council Centre for Medical Mycology.

"Growing as invasive filaments they damage tissue, and growing as single cells they increase in number and spread. The bioimaging approaches enabled by this project will allow us to study the early events that allow growth, which will be essential to developing new therapeutics and diagnostics."

Imaging in low-resource environments

Previous work in Ballou's lab included optimizing fluorescence microscopy workflows to improve the diagnosis of fungal infections, by identifying where on the fungal cell surface a particular fluorescent marker had been located. This offers a route to differentiating between different fungal infections, which may require different treatment.

Exeter has also worked with the University of Cape Town in the Africa Microscopy Initiative, intended to build capacity for microscopy in low-resource settings through training, infrastructure and open-access programs.

The new project will work initially on four fungal species - Mucorales, Candida glabrata, Emergomyces and Cryptococcus - developing bioimaging tools including microfluidics, fluorescent reporters, and computational pipelines.

Cryptococcal infections of the brain are a leading cause of HIV/AIDS-related death and disability globally. The University of Cape Town aims to develop light-sheet imaging techniques to visualise Cryptococcus within intact brains, giving "an unprecedented view of how the infection spreads and disrupts the brain during this fatal disease," according to Rachael Dangarembizi from UCT.

Another focus, to be studied by the University of Edinburgh, is development of engineering-inspired approaches to making subcellular events visible using fluorescent protein reporters, and to imaging the growth of fungal cells in microfluidic traps.

The overall project will allow its network of bench biologists to deliver fresh context about these invasive pathogens to clinic-based scientists. They can then provide more data and disease relevance back to the laboratories' experimental approach.

"We have experts in imaging, data analysis, microfluidics, infection biology, fungal cell biology, engineering biology and, importantly, open science and training," said Elizabeth Ballou. "We're very excited to see the wider medical mycology community take up these technologies in their own research."