The fungus living among us

Abstract

By now, most of us have made peace with the fact that we are host to a complicated extended family of bacteria whose trillion-plus members give us vitamins, help us digest food, protect us from pathogens, and only rarely turn virulent on us. But what about the fungus among us? “Wherever there are bacteria, there’s fungus as well,” says Mahmoud Ghannoum, a microbiologist at Case Western Reserve University. “If you just focus on bacteria, then you are ignoring an important part of the story.” “Fungi have often been ignored,” adds Thomas Auchtung, who studies what he calls “phylogenetically underappreciated forms of life” at Baylor College of Medicine. “And because they’ve been totally ignored, we’re not sure how important they are.” Auchtung and Ghannoum are part of a small community of researchers trying to untangle the role that fungi, a group that includes yeasts and molds, play alongside the larger population