Researchers have announced that a dark green fungus used to break down uniforms and canvas tents during World War II may make biofuels such as ethanol more efficient.
The researchers said they completed the sequence analysis of the filamentous fungus Tricoderma reesei and discovered how the fungus breaks plant fibers into monosaccharides needed for plant fuels.
Reports published in the journal Nature Biotechnology show that although the "favor" of the filamentous fungus Trichoderma reesei for breaking down cotton and other fiber plants has caused much trouble for the military in the South Pacific, this fungus makes us Use switchgrass and other non-food plants for ethanol production.
The big difficulty in using non-food plants to produce biofuels is how to convert them into sugar. Cereal crops such as corn are easily transformed.
Diego Martinez and his colleagues at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico wrote in the report: “This article is accompanied by relevant genomic sequence data to strengthen the industry of the filamentous fungus Trichoderma reesei Applications such as biofuel production provide advice."
The filamentous fungus Trichoderma reesei has been commercially developed. “They have been safe and harmless during the production of industrial enzymes,†the researchers said.
However, this article has overturned some assumptions about the working mechanism of the filamentous fungus T. reesei.
This fungus uses its own secreted enzymes to break down plant fibers into the simplest form of sugar—monosaccharides. However, researchers have not found many gene fragments to prove that they produce more cellulolytic enzymes than other fungi.
Martinez of the University of New Mexico stated in the introduction: “We know that the filamentous fungus Trichoderma reesei can produce a lot of degradative enzymes. But the small number of enzymes it secretes surprise us, and we infer its protein secretion system. It is extremely efficient."
The filamentous fungus Trichoderma reesei can be used on a large scale in commercial applications for secreting fiber degrading enzymes, which can then be added to the pulp to produce sugars. Sugar can be produced by yeast fermentation.
"The information contained in the filamentous fungus Trichoderma reesei genome enables us to better understand how this organism efficiently breaks down cellulose and how it secretes such a large amount of enzymes." Danish organisms involved in this study Joel Cherry, a technology company Novozymes, said.
Cherry also said: "Using this information, we can strengthen these attributes to reduce the cost of converting cellulosic biomass into fuel and chemicals."