For decades, fungi have been a source of US Food and Drug Administration–approved
natural products such as penicillin, cyclosporine, and the statins. Recent breakthroughs in
DNA sequencing suggest that millions of fungal species exist on Earth, with each genome
encoding pathways capable of generating as many as dozens of natural products. However,
the majority of encoded molecules are difficult or impossible to access because the
organisms are uncultivable or the genes are transcriptionally silent. To overcome this …