The chemical compound citric acid has been produced on a large-scale basis for decades with the help of the filamentous fungus Aspergillus niger. The fungus also has enzymes that can be used to help break down plant cell walls for biofuel production, and it plays a key role in the carbon cycle.
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| Aspergillus niger (Sue Karagiosis, PNNL) |
“For biofuels it’s a highly relevant organism since it’s already been scaled up, shown to be safe, and used for enzyme production,” said Scott Baker of DOE JGI partner Pacific Northwest National Laboratory about this A. niger strain selected for sequencing by the DOE JGI in 2005.
“That’s why it was such an important organism to further characterize. We now have the tools and the foundation of knowledge to be able to ask some additional important questions that we weren’t equipped with the genomic resources to answer before.”
In a report published ahead of print May 4, 2011 in Genome Research, Baker and an international team of collaborators including DOE JGI’s Igor Grigoriev compared the genome of the citric-acid producing A. niger strain with another strain that had undergone mutagenesis for enzyme production.
The fungal genomes are expected to help industry generate green chemicals and fuels from sustainable sources. Grigoriev noted that the comparative analysis allowed the team to identify the key genes to each strain’s predominant characteristics. He also said that the information, along with genomic data from additional Aspergillus strains being sequenced at the DOE JGI “should facilitate further optimization of these strains for different bio-products.”