– activities of the WG support both the education and training of mycologists at all stages of their careers

– we aim to motivate clinicians and researchers to incorporate basic research advances in their work, and vice versa we reflect current demands of applied research in the basic research directions

– to revise the taxonomy of the order Onygenales (species and higher-level taxonomy) based on the multiple-gene phylogenies and new nomenclature rules

– to resolve the species boundaries and population genetic structure in complexes of critically important pathogens

– to promote investigations focused on the development and improvement of currently available experimental models for studying pathogenic mechanisms in dermatophytes and dimorphic fungi

– to uncover new virulence factors and genes involved in pathogenesis, which could serve as potential targets for antifungal drug discovery

– to improve our knowledge on the host response against dermatophytosis and fungal-host interactions in general

– to implement the Whole Genome Sequencing and other OMICs technologies into various aspects of research including taxonomic classification, virulence and drug resistance

– to work towards forming a consensus on standard PCR-based diagnostic methodology that would be able to complement or even replace the current diagnostic standards

– to improve existing and/or develop new rapid diagnostic tools (e.g., MALDI-TOF-MS, PCR probes) for detection of less common and emerging pathogens

– to monitor increasing antifungal resistance in dermatophytes and molecular mechanisms involved in this process

– to propose suitable preventive measures to minimize global spread of resistance

– to raise awareness of antifungal resistance in dermatophytes among the clinicians, and coordinate interventions to monitor and direct the appropriate use of antifungal agents

– to promote antifungal susceptibility testing in dermatophytes and dimorphic fungi with the use of appropriate methodologies

– to build a curated database with sequence and population genetic markers representing the global diversity of dermatophytes and dimorphic fungi (epidemiological surveillance of infections, taxonomic and population genetic purposes)

– to start registering the contemporary data about geographic distributions of pathogens and their reservoirs (environmental sources/ hosts), and local epidemiological data, thus paving the way for a future systematic work on global epidemiology

– to promote preservation of fungal strains in international culture collections and make them available to the international scientific community, hence encouraging further researches

– to expand the re-sampling of fungal culture collections and archived paraffin tissues to get some knowledge about the etiology of infections in the past

– to create an educational representative set of strains of pathogenic species (including uncommon agents) available at low- or no-cost for frontline laboratories and research institutions