ABSTRACT
Some 4000 enzymes are known today and of these about 200 are in commercial use with an estimated value of US$2.3 billion in 2007. The majority of today’s industrial enzymes are microbial in origin and about 40% of these are produced from fungal hosts. Prospecting for filamentous fungi exhibiting novel bioactivities or genes with economic potential has not been as vigorous as with bacteria, for example, but is expanding rapidly. Current investigations reveal that the more unusual and extreme regions of the planet play host to a previously unrecognized wealth of microfungal material, in particular those with the potential to yield cold-active and thermophilic enzymes. Recent oil crises and increasing prices at the local pump stations have promoted global research into alternative sources for fuel. In particular, this has invigorated the search for fungi capable of producing a set of enzymes that 220can effectively convert plant biomass to fermentable sugars. A complement to classical prospecting by cultivation is the molecular approach of screening for enzyme-encoding DNA sequences. This PCR based strategy combined with chromosomal walking PCR has been successfully used for the isolation and heterologous expression of a number of enzyme-encoding genes. This latter approach can be further supported with the expanding volume of global sequence data becoming available from the various fungal genome sequencing projects, and from recent developments in proteomics and mass spectrometry for protein identification.
