This NSF award by the Office of Emerging Frontiers in Research and Innovation supports work to enable the creation of novel platforms and animal models allowing new insight in complex multi-kingdom interactions. Significant progress has been made to decode the small molecule signals developed by all organisims to respond to, and survive in, their environments. However, evolutionary programs have ensured that other organisms mimic or highjack these communication signals in a defensive or symbiotic maneuver, exponentially increasing the scope and complexity of this chemical language. The outcome of these inter-kingdom signals can determine the behavior, survival, virulence or gene expression of all participating organisms. Because of the disparity in the methods and platforms used and available to study each organisms as well as the complexity of the signaling involved, progress in discovering these interactions is slow. Here we bring together expertise from four scientific disciplines; chemistry, biomedical engineering, immunology and microbiology; to present disruptive methodologies to capture this language. Focusing on fungal secondary metabolites (SM) as the communication molecules, we demonstrate the enabling features and high-throughput power of novel microdevices in both hypothesis driven and discovery-based science. Our overarching goal is to create broadly applicable microscaled methods to unlock the secret language of cell-to-cell communication in intra- and inter-kingdom interactions. A key component of this award is to prime students at the highschool level to the broad implications on human health, food safety and the environment of these multi-kingdom interactions, through the creation of an interactive, hands-on, lab course, in which students will be sensitized to aspects of micro-engineering, fungal genetics and molecular biology.
