MycoRant

A recent post at sciencedaily.com, Fungal Map Of Mutations Key To Increasing Enzyme Production For Bioenergy Use, discussed once again the use of Trichoderma reesei as a possible biofuel producer. This time some work at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) was mentioned.

“We want to understand the path that we’ve taken to high enzyme production because it isn’t exactly known what was done to these strains,” said Scott Baker, a DOE JGI scientist at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory who, along with Christian Kubicek of TU Vienna and Antoine Margeot of IFP, is a senior author of the paper published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. “There were three mutations characterized previously that gave us some clues, but that just touched the tip of the iceberg. There’s over 200 mutations we found in the T. reesei genome across 60 genes. We now have a blueprint on which we can do future studies to see which genes are related to the enzymes. If you can produce more enzyme more efficiently, that makes your process — in this case the production of biofuel — more economical.”

I decided to see what else was going on with respect to fungi at PNNL, so I contacted the lab to ask about it. Researcher Scott Baker had this to say about fungal research at PNNL:

“Fungal biotechnology work at PNNL is aimed accelerating the development of fungal strains that have utility in the future renewable fuels and chemicals area. Fungi are very productive producers of enzymes and small molecules (i.e. organic acids and other chemical compounds). We want to understand the biological processes that underlie the high productivity of fungi.

“The T. reesei work that was recently published in PNAS is a great example of how the Joint Genome Institute (JGI) accelerates downstream biological research that our group and others will do. The work in our group is focused around fungal bioprocess development and optimization and fungal genome analysis, proteomics and molecular genetics (i.e. gene deletions, etc).

The lab has a fact sheet about the JGI Fungal Genome Program (PDF) (kindly sent by David Gilbert).

Tags: genomics, JGI, PNNL, Trichoderma