This TED Talk features my college's Manat-El Ghaled,

recorded live at TED Global 2017.

Will the blight end the chest not?

The farmers rather guess not.

He keeps moldering at the roots and sending up new shoots

till another parasite shall come to end the blight.

At the beginning of the 20th century, the eastern American chestnut population,

counting nearly four billion trees, was completely decimated by a fungal infection.

Fungi are the most destructive pathogen of plant, including crop of major economic

importance. Can you imagine that today crop losses associated to fungal infection are estimated

to billion of dollars per year worldwide? That represents enough food calorie to feed half a billion

people. And this leads to severe repercussion, including episodes of famine in developing countries,

large reduction of income for farmer and distributors, high-priceless for consumers,

and risk of exposure to mycotoxin, poison produced by fungi.

The problems that we face is that the current method

used to prevent and treat those dreadful diseases, such as genetic control, exploiting natural

sources of resistance, crop rotation or sea treatment among others, are still limited or ephemeral.

They have to be constantly renewed.

Therefore, we urgently need to develop more efficient strategies,

and for this, research is required to identify biological mechanisms

that can be targeted by novel antifungal treatments.

One feature of fungi is that they cannot move

...