Infectious fungal diseases continue to take their toll in terms of human
suffering and enormous economic losses. Invasive infections by
opportunistic fungal pathogens are a major cause of morbidity and
mortality in immuno-compromised individuals. At the same time, plant
pathogenic fungi have devastating effects on crop production and human
health. New strategies for antifungal control are required to meet the
challenges posed by these agents, and such approaches can only be
developed through the identification of novel biochemical and molecular
targets. However, in contrast to bacterial pathogens, fungi display a
wealth of "lifestyles" and modes of infection. This diversity makes it
extremely difficult to identify individual, evolutionarily conserved
virulence determinants and represents a major stumbling block in the
search for common antifungal targets. In order to activate the infection
programme, all fungal pathogens must undergo appropriate developmental
transitions that involve cellular differentiation and the introduction
of a new morphogenetic programme. How growth, cell cycle progression and
morphogenesis are co-ordinately regulated during development has been an
active area of research in fungal model systems such as budding and
fission yeast. By contrast, we have only limited knowledge of how these
developmental processes shape fungal pathogenicity, or of the role of
the cell cycle and morphogenesis regulators as true virulence factors.
This book combines state-of-the-art expertise from diverse pathogen
model systems to update our current understanding of the regulation of
fungal morphogenesis as a key determinant of pathogenicity in fungi.
