The Forestry and Agricultural Biotechnology Institute (FABI) fungal culture collection (CMW) and the CMW-IA culture collection have a new curator, Nicole van Vuuren. Nicole, who is currently completing her PhD in FABI under the supervision of Prof. Cobus Visagie and Dr Neriman Yilmaz, will assume her duties on 1 November. The current curator, Dr Seonju Marincowitz has decided to step down after 14 years at the helm but will remain in FABI, publishing her research work. The curator plays a critical role in the research activities of the Institute and its global research collaborators.

The CMW collection is the largest collection of fungal cultures and the biggest tree pathogenic fungi collection on the African continent that houses more than 60,000 fungal strains from FABI researchers and their global collaborators. It was started by Professors Mike and Brenda Wingfield in 1978 to preserve cultures relevant to the first forest pathology programme in South Africa. In 1989, this research-oriented collection became the formal repository for forestry-relevant fungi in South Africa as part of the Tree Protection Co-operative Programme (TPCP).

More recently, in conjunction with the establishment of Innovation Africa @UP, the associated collection CMW-IA was established and registered with the World Federation of Culture Collections (WFCC). CMW-IA is an open culture collection that houses a subset of reference strains that are important for forestry and agricultural research, including plant pathogens, ex-type reference strains and strains whose genomes have been sequenced.

As part of a long-term vision for these collections, FABI entered into a collaboration with Hexagon Bio (USA), whereby the genomes of the fungi represented in CMW and CMW-IA are being sequenced and made available to researchers to promote the research goals of the institute and its partners.

FABI’s culture collections are of international importance as a reference collection for key plant pathogenic fungi that are important for forestry and agriculture. Access to whole genome sequences of these strains is crucial for current and future research projects aimed at understanding the biology, ecology and pathogenicity of these fungi. This project will help to unlock the value of the fungi preserved in CMW and CMW-IA and enable researchers to make important contributions to mycology at an international level in the future.