Fungi play vital ecological roles in nature as major nutrient recyclers, establish mutualistic relationships with other organisms, and cause devastating diseases of plants and animals, including humans. They are instrumental in the production of food and key medicinal products, among many other biotechnological and industrial applications. The experimental tractability of a few fungi (e.g. the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae and the filamentous fungi Neurospora crassa and Aspergillus nidulans) attracted the attention of biologists in the classical genetics era, and they have served ever since as premier model organisms in eukaryotic genetics, molecular and cellular biology, and evolution. Nevertheless, classical model systems are not necessarily the most suitable organisms for addressing many questions in biology. The more recent advances in next-generation sequencing and genetic engineering now render the study of a much wider range of fungi feasible.

This Methods Collection aims to bring together a wide range of either established and extensively optimized or novel species-specific techniques for the genetic and molecular study of non-model fungi (e.g. methods for the extraction and analysis of nucleic acids and proteins, genetic transformation techniques, plasmid-mediated applications, gene knock-out and tagging, analysis of gene function in relevant biological processes, etc.). The methods may be relevant to either emerging model systems with already established research communities (e.g. species of Candida, methylotrophic yeasts, Eremothecium, Fusarium, Magnaporthe, Verticillium, Trichoderma, Metarhizium, Zymoseptoria, and Ustilago among others) or fungi that have attracted less attention so far.