Filamentous Fungi for Production of Food Additives and Processing Aids

Abstract

Filamentous fungi are metabolically versatile organisms with a very wide distribution in nature. They exist in association with other species, e.g. as lichens or mycorrhiza, as pathogens of animals and plants or as free-living species. Many are regarded as nature's primary degraders because they secrete a wide variety of hydrolytic enzymes that degrade waste organic materials. Many species produce secondary metabolites such as polyketides or peptides and an increasing range of fungal species is exploited commercially as sources of enzymes and metabolites for food or pharmaceutical applications. The recent availability of fungal genome sequences has provided a major opportunity to explore and further exploit fungi as sources of enzymes and metabolites. In this review chapter we focus on the use of fungi in the production of food additives but take a largely pre-genomic, albeit a mainly molecular, view of the topic.

Application of the Saccharomyces cerevisiae FLP/ FRT Recombination System in Filamentous Fungi for Marker Recycling and Construction of Knockout Strains Devoid of Heterologous Genes

“…Unfortunately, however, the yield of most heterologous proteins is generally far lower than that of homologous proteins (8). To solve this problem, different approaches have been developed, including multicopy integration of the coding gene, use of strong regulatory promoters, and fusion with carrier proteins (3,38). Moreover, codon usage has been identified as an important factor for efficient gene expression, indicating that differences in the codon usage between two species, in general, and between prokaryotes and eukaryotes, in particular, can result in translation inefficiency (20,27,36,59).…”

Biochemical and Molecular Analysis of Superoxide Dismutase in Sordaria fimicola and Aspergillus niger Collected from Different Environments

“…Fungi belonging to Ascomycota are decomposers in most ecosystems, making an important contribution to the ecological balance and also having great industrial application due to the presence of different enzymes [2]. A total of 16 fungal enzymes are used in the food industry and 13 of them have been obtained from Aspergillus [3].…”

Biochemical and Molecular Analysis of Laccase Enzyme in Saprobic Fungus; Sordaria fimicola

“…Laccase has ability to oxidize compounds like polyphenols, cyclic diamines, methoxy substituted phenols and other compounds (Baldrian, 2006). Fungi secrete enzymes in the growth media and purification of these secreted enzymes is considered relatively easier than from bacterial or plant sources, in which enzymes mostly are retained inside the cell as described by different workers (Archer et al, 2008;Upadhyay et al, 2016). Due to higher oxidation reduction potential (+800 mV) as compared to bacteria and plant, the fungal laccases have more application in biotechnology and food industry (Minussi et al, 2002).…”