Cedric Ndinga Muniania

Postdoctoral Research Associate, Plant Disease Team

“I have always loved microbes.”

Cedric Ndinga Muniania is captivated by fungi and their multitude of forms, structures, and uses.

“They can go all the way from being in bread, cheese, wine, beer, and all those things but they also can be used in agriculture, in conservation, for human health, or they are food, like mushrooms. Fungi have the ability to have multifaceted areas. To be both microscopic, which you can see in the microscope, and also large. That is what started my interest in fungi, the ability to navigate different fields. I fell in love with the fungi of the desert. I started spending nights under the microscope, looking at different shapes and structures. From that point on, I have been hooked.” 

What led you to Rachel’s lab?

“I took a bit of a detour. One of the big desert findings of my master’s degree was that a lot of the fungi that I was studying, which was the endophyte, were strongly related to temperature. They used to increase in abundance during the summer and they would decrease at the start of the fall. So really they had this temperature-dependent growth and diversity. From there I wanted to pursue a PhD studying similar things but in larger areas. Deserts are great, but sometimes they are locally placed. You don’t have a desert that spreads across the United States in one big region. So I decided to start studying prairie plants and the fungi of prairies. Prairies are really where you have a lot of fungi living and doing a lot of interactions. And because the plants are perennial, some of them can be there for years, so you have a historical perspective of how the current climate is changing. That is really where my science blossomed. That is what I became an expert of while completing my PhD – fungal endophytes of prairies. 

A lot of endophytes live inside the plant, but the plant shows no symptoms. You have to use an expensive molecular technique to know whether a fungus is A, B, C or D.  Rachel’s program is a bit different because she studies mildew which you can see.  Mildew is a type of fungus. I pivoted towards Rachel’s lab because there is a way to track it a little more sustainably. I wanted to study plant fungal interaction in the context of climate change, but in a way that I can track it and know what we are measuring. I wanted to see it, how it was produced, and how environmental factors impact it.”