Microfluidic Tools for Probing Fungal-Microbial Interactions at the Cellular Level

Filamentous fungi are successful inhabitants of soil and play a major role in soil ecosystems, such as in the decomposition of organic and inorganic matter, as well as regulation of nutrient levels. There they also find numerous opportunities to interact with a variety of other microbes such as bacteria or other fungi. Studying fungal interactions at the cellular level, however, can be challenging owing to the black box-like nature of soil. New microfluidic tools are being developed for the study of fungal interactions; two platforms designed to study bacterial-fungal and fungal-fungal interactions are highlighted. Within these microchannels, fungal-microbial interactions can be monitored in controlled physico-chemical environments at higher temporal and spatial resolution than previously possible. Application of these tools have yielded numerous novel biological insights, such as the observation of bacterial polar attachment to hyphae or revealing uncharacterised fungal-fungal antagonisms. A key feature of these methodologies regards the ease of use of this tool by non-experts, yielding highly translatable technologies for use in microbiology labs.