Monday, May 2, 2011
Grand Ballroom C-D, 2nd fl (Sheraton Seattle)
The goals of our project 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. We collected decaying Miscanthus from 8 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. We recovered 950 fungal colonies and by molecular identification placed the 106 fungal species in Hypocreales (Sordariomycetes), Pleosporales (Dothidiomycetes) and Chaetothryiales (Eurotiomycetes), the latter two groups have not been mined for plant decay fungi. The rare recovery of known weed fungi and the frequent recovery of Hypocreales, home to known decay fungi, validated our approach. To cast our enzyme discovery net as broadly as possible, first we chose to assay the biodegradation capacity of 35 common and rare fungi via high throughput solid-substrate cultures of respective fungi on pretreated ground Miscanthus over 8 weeks. The biomass weight loss results that varied 2 to 23% also showed that the most common species and frequently studied genera like Trichoderma and Fusarium are not necessarily the efficient Miscanthus biomass degraders. Biomass component assays on residues and enzymatic activity assays on cell-free liquid samples collected at different sampling points are currently in progress. We then aim to study the enzyme systems of the selected fungi via transcriptomics and proteomics.