ABSTRACT
Filamentous fungi have been work horses in the service of humanity for a long time. Fermented Asian foods such as shoyu (soy sauce), miso, and sake have been produced using koji fungi (domesticated versions of Aspergillus oryzae) in China and Japan for more than a thousand years. However, the modern well-dened industrial production of specic compounds was spurred in 1894 by the Japanese-American Jockichi Takamine. Takamine used cultures of Aspergillus oryzae to produce a complex mixture of enzymes sold as TakadiastaseTM (Hjort, 2003). Since then, the fermentation industry has expanded, and lamentous fungi are now being used to produce a wide range of commercially available products from simple organic acids in Aspergillus niger through more complex molecules such as statins and β-lactams (in A. terreus and P. chrysogenum, respectively) and to protein production in several fungal species. For several types of products, lamentous fungi dominate the market as production hosts (Nevalainen et al., 2005). Table 25.1 summarizes the most used cell factories and the ones being discussed in this review.
