The HBO series The Last of Us makes a fungal pandemic seem absurd, and yet all too real. Our neighbors aren’t staggering from their homes like zombies whose heads resemble giant mushrooms, but still, many viewers might feel that twinge of post-pandemic vulnerability. For those of us who study the distribution, evolution and biology of fungal pathogens, the show is on the extreme side, but the underlying message is clear: We need to study and understand whatever future threats are out there.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the World Health Organization and others actively monitor fungal pathogens and clinical cases of disease. They have made it abundantly clear that these issues have been a concern for far longer than The Last of Us has been onscreen.
While the television show dramatizes the potential of fungal disease, some of the concerns raised by the show are a reality, such as the lack of reliable diagnosis, treatment and vaccination against fungal pathogens.
Diseases caused by fungi are concerning on two fronts — they not only affect humans, pets and wild animals, but they can also devastate agriculture, causing massive crop failure. The very problems we face in the health sector are mirrored in the agricultural sector, and some fungal pathogens can cause disease across both arenas. The range of fungal diseases in plants reads like something from a medieval text: gummy stem blight, corn rust, black root rot, cavity spot, fusarium wilts, sclerotinia rots
and more.
Given the potential for disaster caused by these pathogens, I formed a team with fellow scientists at Los Alamos National Laboratory to further explore the fungal world, particularly where it intersects with human health. The combination of the laboratory’s unique detection, modeling and analysis expertise enables us not only to better track and diagnose fungal pathogens and disease, but also to prepare for the possibility of a fungal pandemic through research into novel countermeasures and means of prevention.
Members of our team have worked on a variety of fungal pathogens, particularly Coccidioides (causing valley fever), Histoplasma (histoplasmosis), Blastomyces (blastomycosis) and Aspergillus (aspergillosis). Coccidioides is particularly relevant in the Southwest, where my teammate Morgan Gorris and her colleagues are examining how a warming climate could expand the regions where the fungus occurs across the western United States, including New Mexico. Valley fever’s symptoms can range from a mild cough, fatigue and fever that last weeks or months, to severe complications affecting the joints and nervous system.
Another team member, Kimberly Kaufeld, leads a project to estimate fungal disease risk based upon environmental data for both valley fever and histoplasmosis, a surprisingly common pneumonia-like infection. The research is aimed at providing a better understanding of the areas where these fungi are likely to be present and of the ways in which the fungi are expanding into the northern United States as the climate warms.
Our Los Alamos team brings scientists with diverse expertise and backgrounds together to tackle a wide range of topics related to these pathogens and the diseases they cause. We are studying how information from genomes can help us better understand how fungal pathogens evolve, where they are located and which features of their genomes boost their disease-causing abilities. We combine these techniques with statistics and modeling, using clinical and environmental data to track outbreaks of fungal disease and the factors that contribute to them.
Some of our team’s efforts build on laboratory-funded projects to survey wastewater for COVID-19, but we are adapting these approaches to go beyond targeted viral searches to survey fungal pathogens from any environmental sample. Our team is applying unique multidisciplinary approaches developed at the Laboratory that use cutting-edge gene-sequencing data.
While the characters played by Pedro Pascal and Bella Ramsey in The Last ofUs fight their way across a fictional blighted landscape past people caught unawares by nature’s wrath, in the real world, scientists at Los Alamos are bringing the best of our high-tech tools and knowledge to bear, making New Mexico a significant contributor to the battle against fungal threats.
Aaron Robinson is a mycologist and bioinformatician in the Bioscience division at Los Alamos National Laboratory.
