FABI Mycologist Lands Major Oppenheimer Memorial Trust Award to Unlock South Africa’s Fungal Secrets

Professor. Cobus Visagie has received one of South Africa’s most prestigious research grants, with the Oppenheimer Memorial Trust selecting him as the recipient of its 2026 New Frontiers Research Award. This five-year award represents a R7.5-million investment in a field that underpins life on earth yet remains profoundly underexplored.

Fungi are everywhere and essential to almost everything, from breaking down organic matter and cycling nutrients through ecosystems, to the production of food, beverages and life-saving medicines. Despite this, the vast majority of fungal species remain undescribed. Globally, scientists have catalogued roughly 160,000 species, yet estimates suggest there may be as many as 2.5 million in total. South Africa, as a global biodiversity hotspot, is thought to harbour around 200,000 of these, most of them still unknown to science. That is the gap MUFASA (Mapping Unseen Fungi Across South Africa) is designed to address.

MUFASA has three goals. It will discover – sampling systematically across South Africa’s national and provincial parks using both culture-based methods and modern metabarcoding to build the first coherent national picture of our fungal diversity. It will build – expanding culture collections, DNA reference sequences, whole genomes, and ecological datasets that will serve as national assets for decades to come. And it will inspire – visiting schools across the country, inviting children to collect soil samples from their own neighbourhoods, and if we find a new species, naming it after the child who found it.

Remember that Alexander Fleming’s world-changing discovery of penicillin came from a Penicillium mould on a forgotten petri dish. The next Penicillium rubens may be sitting in a handful of South African soil right now. MUFASA starts that journey.

The award was announced at a ceremony on 27 May in Johannesburg by OMT chairperson Rebecca Lily Oppenheimer. Prof. Visagie expressed his deep gratitude to the Oppenheimer Memorial Trust for their generous support and their belief in the importance of this work.

Source: FABI

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