Project description:Myceliophthora thermophila is a thermophilic fungus with great biotechnological characteristics for industrial applications, which can degrade and utilize all major polysaccharides in plant biomass. Nowadays, it has been developing into a platform for production of enzyme, commodity chemicals and biofuels. Therefore, an accurate genome-scale metabolic model would be an accelerator for this fungus becoming a universal chassis for biomanufacturing. Here we present a genome-scale metabolic model for M. thermophila constructed using an auto-generating pipeline with consequent thorough manual curation. Temperature plays a basic and critical role for the microbe growth. we are particularly interested in the genome wide response at metabolic layer of M. thermophilia as it is a thermophlic fungus. To study the effects of temperature on metabolic characteristics of M. thermophila growth, the fungus was cultivated under different temperature. The metabolic rearrangement predicted using context-specific GEMs integrating transcriptome data.The developed model provides new insights into thermophilic fungi metabolism and highlights model-driven strain design to improve biotechnological applications of this thermophilic lignocellulosic fungus.
Project description:Thermophilic fungus Myceliophthora thermophila with great capacity for polysaccharides degradation is attractive to be engineered into a cell factory to produce chemicals and biofuels directly from renewable polysaccharides such as starch. Understanding the molecular mechanism of starch degradation of the fungi would be helpful. To date, there has been no transcriptome analysis on starch in thermophilic fungi. In this study, we performed the transcriptomic profile of M. thermophila responding to soluble starch, and a 342-gene set was identified as “starch regulon”, including the major amylolytic enzyme (Mycth_72393), which was verified thereafter as the most important such hydrolase for starch degradation in this fungus. Moreover, the function of key amylolytic enzyme regulator AmyR in M. thermophila was evaluated by analyzing the performance of its deletion mutant using our CRISPR/Cas9 system, which showed significantly decreased amylase activity and poor growth on starch. Additionally, deletion of amyR led to resistance to carbon catabolite repression (CCR) and enhanced cellulases production. Our study provides an insight into understanding the molecular basis of starch degradation in this thermophilic fungus, and will accelerate the fungal strain rational engineering for starch-based biochemical production.
Project description:Blastocladiella emersonii life cycle presents a number of drastic biochemical and morphological changes, mainly during two cell differentiation stages: the germination and the sporulation. To investigate the transcriptional changes taking place during the sporulation phase, which culminates with the production of the zoospores, motile cells responsible for the dispersal of the fungus, microarray experiments were performed.
Project description:The development of proteins hyper-production platform in thermophilic fungus Myceliophthora thermophila is essential for both molecular basis understanding and industrial process. Herein the glucoamylase hyper-production strain MtGM12 was generated from our previously strain MtYM6 via genetically engineering. Transcriptional profiling analyses revealed that the amylolytic gene expression levels were significantly up-regulated in the MtGM12 than in MtWT.
