Mushrooms - a magnificent kingdom and one that is still mostly mysterious to us. It is estimated that there are between five and ten million species of mushrooms in nature. We only know a small fraction.. Fungi are is more like people than bacteria.
This episode will not deal with edible mushrooms or hallucinogenic mushrooms, but with pathogenic fungi in agriculture.

More than half of plant diseases are caused by fungi, which can survive exposure to toxic substances and even develop resistance - a serious  opponent.

Dr. Shay Kobo, head of the Department of Plants and Microbiology at the Faculty of Food and Environmental Agriculture, develops pesticides based on targeted damage to the chromosomes of pathogenic fungi. It concentrates on fungi that damage wheat and barley, mangoes and tomatoes. His vision is to find new tricks to combat fungi. 

As someone who came to agriculture and mushrooms specifically from cancer research (and even finds parallels between the fungus and the cancerous growth), Dr. Kubo thinks outside the box: in his war against a fungus called "Fusarium mangifera", which flies through the air, penetrates mango buds   and damages the fruits. He tries to enlist the sun on our side: Since the spore flies in the wind and is exposed to the sun, Kobo is trying to find a way to increase its sensitivity to UV.

We discussed the genetics of fungi and the development of targeted pesticides against mycelium - a growth form of a fungus that has the properties of a multicellular creature, like us. The mycelium has a "brain" and can differentiate into different structures.