TITLE:
Carbon utilization profile of a thermophilic fungus, Thermomyces lanuginosus using phenotypic microarray
AUTHORS:
Nokuthula Peace Mchunu, Kugen Permaul, Maqsudul Alam, Suren Singh
KEYWORDS:
Filamentous Fungi; Thermophilic; Carbon Source; Hexose; Pentose
JOURNAL NAME:
Advances in Bioscience and Biotechnology,
Vol.4 No.9A,
September
11,
2013
ABSTRACT: The thermophilic filamentous
fungus, Thermomyces lanuginosus produces the largest amount of xylanase reported. In addition to this, it
expresses large amount of other enzymes that have been used industrially or
have academic interest. Thus, this fungus has a potential to be applied for
biomass conversion to produce biofuel or other applications. In this study, the
Biolog system was used to characterize the utilisation and growth of T. lanuginosus on 95 carbon sources. The
carbohydrates based compounds, both single sugars and oligosaccharide, showed
the best utilisation profile, with the pentose sugar xylose inducing the
highest growth, followed by trehelose, raffinose, D-mannose turanose fructose
and glucose. Among oligosaccharides, sucrose had the highest mycelium
formation followed by stachyose, maltose, maltotriose, glycogen and dextrin.
Interestingly the fungus also grew well on cellobiose suggesting that this
fungus can produce cellulose hydrolysing proteins. D-alanine was the best
amino acid to promote fungal growth while the effect of other amino acids
tested was similar to the control. These results demonstrate the ability of
this fungus to grow relatively well on most plant based compounds thus making
this fungus a possible candidate for plant biomass conversion which can be
applied to a number of biotechnological applications including biofuel production.