The goals of our research are to discover cell wall deconstructing enzymes from the fungi that are best adapted to decay Miscanthus and Saccharum biomass in nature, and to document the diversity and distribution of cultivable and uncultivable fungi in these decaying plants. Late in 2008 and early in 2009 we collected decaying Miscanthus from 7 sites in Illinois and decaying Saccharum from 11 sites in Louisiana. We split these samples, committing the first half to cultivable fungi and saving the other for nucleic acid identification of all fungi. To recover Ascomycota fungi that truly decay plants and to recover slow growing fungi, we washed the plant material repeatedly to remove spores and cultivated from plant fragments small enough to harbor at most one mycelium. To sample Basidiomycota fungi we cultivated from mycelia mats. We recovered 900 fungal colonies and by molecular identification placed the most frequently recovered fungal species in Hypocreales (Sordariomycetes), Pleosporales (Dothideomycetes) and Chaetothryiales (Eurotiomycetes). The rare recovery of known weed fungi and the frequent recovery of Hypocreales, home to known decay fungi, validated our approach. We are particularly interested in Pleosporales and Chaetothyriales, groups that have not been mined for plant decay fungi. A high throughput solid-substrate fermentation (using alkali pretreated ground Miscanthus) with the 12 most commonly encountered Ascomycota and Basidiomycota resulted into biomass weight loss of 8-14% over four weeks. We now are expanding this experiment to include the 100 most common fungi to select some or all strains for studies of secreted proteins.