Can you talk about your early days in that initial discovery? What brought that interest in this specific fungi?

Started at Colorado State with Edel and Chutt and Tex Baker.

and went to a meeting and they were talking about protoplast fusion.

If you want to develop a new variety of plant, you use sexual hybridization.

But for a fungus, they don't have these, at least the strains we use, have no known sexual strain.

So there is a process whereby you can dissolve away the cell walls and fuse them and Then you get, it became a very interesting exercise that the, there were huge diversity introduced that way.

And when we select, we went through, I don't know, thousands of strains and we finally selected T22 because, and this is a really important concept, it's rhizosphere competence.

What is the role of trichoderma in the soil microbiome? There

That's the point.

It's trichoderma there.

And so what happens is it's a trichoderma.

There's a complex interaction with the plant cell membranes that induces the plant to produce disease controlling, active disease controlling properties.

And these go systemically, and they're quote, transduced throughout the entire plant.

So, when we started, we thought other things were going on.

For example, trichoderma is very good at parasitizing other fungi.

So is it the plant producing antibiotics or something that disease- Well, yeah, they're