Sue Barker: When is a fungal infection not a disease?

Sue Barker – Adjunct Senior Lecturer, UWA

Early in the fossil record of plants is found key evidence of a mutually beneficial fungal companionship that persists globally today; arguably underlying the success of life on Earth. Yet most people are unaware of it. Perhaps the relative anonymity of this association can be explained by its name; mycorrhizal symbiosis (from the Greek words for fungus and root); not exactly the catchiest of terms. And newspapers put the war on the front and the feelgood stuff buried in the middle for a reason. Be that as it may, the aim of Sue’s presentation is to inform and engage you, so Greek will be kept to a minimum whilst she shares some of the stories about mycorrhizas that compelled her persistence in research on them over a 25-year academic career. It was all sparked by a review that challenged the concept of species by asking, if the members of two species require each other to survive through evolutionary time, are they really two separate species?