V Congress of Molecular and Cellular Biology of Fungi, San Miguel Regla, Mexico, 5-9 October, 2003. The fungal community in Mexico is young but growing rapidly. Nevertheless, there are some well established groups with lots of experience and such meetings contribute to spread knowledge and expertise through the younger members. It is ten years now since the first meeting and every two years the group has met with enthusiasm and good results. In our experience these meetings have been successful in establishing collaboration projects, so that we can share and optimise our resources. Also they have contributed to the formation of human resources in this area since students have the opportunity to present their work and are encouraged to discuss it. The topics to be reviewed comprise the work of many different groups and include: biocontrol, signal transduction pathways, stress responses, pathogenic fungi, metabolism and metabolic engineering, gene expression regulation, biotechnology, cellular biology and development, genomics, and population genetics.