Set a fungus to catch a fungus

In 1960, a group of scientists cut a slice off a mushroom growing on a beech tree in the woods of South Bohemia, now part of the Czech Republic. Cultivating the sample in their lab, they noticed that their new mushroom prevented other fungi from growing in the same area. Little did they know, they had come across the inspiration for a new type of fungicide worth billions of pounds.

Discovering new fungicides is big business. Not only can they be used to treat infections like athlete's foot, but they also form a major part of the global crop protection industry, which was worth $47 billion in 2012. The compound responsible for what the Czech microbiologists observed was the starting point for the development of azoxystrobin, the world's best-selling fungicide with over $1 billion-worth sold worldwide each year.

Unfortunately, being behind the iron curtain of post-war Soviet Europe meant that the discovery of this unusual mushroom did not get very far. It took another 17 years before a team from [West] Germany discovered the same activity in a similar species. This time, though, it was noticed.

The team of scientists led by Tim Anke isolated antifungal compounds from the mushroom, which they named oudemansin and strobilurin. These were very similar compounds and both contained the ? -methoxyacrylate group that is key to their activity. Researchers from ICI's agricultural division (now part of Syngenta) read Anke's paper about these new compounds and asked for a sample to test. 'They're an interesting pair of compounds and you can see they are quite similar to each other structurally,' says John Clough, a chemist at Syngenta who worked on the project from the beginning. 'Strobilurin is the simpler of the compounds, so from the point of view of synthesis it is a more attractive starting point.'