Programmable resilience: harnessing extreme fungi for climate-adaptive biosystems

Extremophilic fungi, especially those from polar and desert environments, are increasingly recognized as active, programmable systems rather than passive stress survivors. Capable of conditional gene activation and multi-stress sensing, these fungi exhibit shared molecular strategies, such as melanization, antioxidant production, and osmolyte synthesis under convergent environmental pressures. This review reframes them as climate-responsive organisms with potential roles in biosensing, synthetic biology, and ecological forecasting. It is herein proposed the Fungal Vulnerability Index, a modular tool that integrates multi-omics and environmental data to assess ecosystem sensitivity. Their metabolic efficiency, transcriptional plasticity, and environmental memory make fungi promising components for climate-adaptive technologies and Artificial Intelligence-integrated ecological systems in the Anthropocene.