As a headlining event for our Department at Alumni Reunion 2025, Professor Shelley Lumba gave a Stress-Free Degree lecture on the “Secret Language between Plants and Fungi” that drew a diverse sell-out crowd of all ages.

Lumba started with the engaging idea of the wood wide web, a connected network of plants and fungi under the soil that transfers nutrients, signals, water and other information.

“I found out that this topic was already of great interest to the audience,” she asserts, “People are now realising how much fungi impact our lives and that we step on them every day and that we have no clue that all these conversations are going on under our feet”

Lumba explained to the audience how conversations between plants and fungi are made up small molecules that both plants and fungi can understand. To decode this “chemical language”, she described her lab’s molecular genetic and genomics experiments on baker’s yeast, a fungal model organism.

Through Lumba’s experiments, guests learned how small molecules from plants hijack fungal processes like phosphate metabolism, which helps the plant acquire an essential nutrient from their fungal partner.

Lumba explained how AI programs like AlphaFold 2 help to model proteins so that she can predict which small molecule can attach to a protein to provoke a signal.

“So you may ask ‘what can we do with this?’” Lumba prompted the audience “We’ve shown that enhancing interactions with fungi can make it so the plant doesn’t rely as much on exogenously provided fertiliser for nutrients like phosphate.”

“For human health, you can also start to think about research on antifungal agents. You start based on the knowledge of how plant molecules interact with fungi and target these proteins in human pathogenic fungi.”

Lumba’s talk was well received and provoked many questions, including on the role of AI is research, and the possibilities of genome editing.