ABSTRACT
The vision for this chapter stems from our experiences working in and managing industrial microbial screening programs and as professional mycologists. Many newcomers to microbial screening are as unacquainted with wild species of fungi as they are unknowing of what can be done with fungi in the context of the technology of pharmaceutical/industrial screening. Rather than exhaustively list methods for obtaining fungi from nature, we have attempted to set up a framework of the basic methods, tools, and organizational principles that we have found most useful for channeling fungal germplasm into the academic, pharmaceutical, or enzyme discovery laboratories. We start by reminding users of biodiversity of how the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) has altered the use of biological resources, and then follow with an analysis of recent organizational and technical trends of natural products discovery programs, especially in Japan [1]. We provide some stepby-step approaches for what we have found to be some of the most fruitful techniques for coaxing wild species into cultivation, especially filamentous ascomycetes and basidiomycetes, which are the most genetically apt to produce secondary metabolites. Finally,
we call attention to the need to be curious and critical and to continuously strive to evaluate and improve the contribution of the microorganism to the screening process.
