Lean and mean biomass-degrading fungus reveals capabilities for improved biofuel production

“The sequencing of the Trichoderma reesei genome is a major step towards using renewable feedstocks for the production of fuels and chemicals,” said Joel Cherry, director of research activities in second-generation biofuels for Novozymes, one of the collaborating institutions on the study. “This soft rot fungus serves as the world’s most prodigious producer of cellulases and is already a dominant source of a wide variety of cellulase products for the textile industry worldwide. It is also the organism of choice for producing enzymes for the breakdown of cellulosic biomass to fermentable sugars, which can then be biologically converted to fuels and chemical building blocks. The information contained in its genome will allow us both to better understand how this organism degrades cellulose so efficiently and to understand how it produces the required enzymes so prodigiously. Using this information, it may be possible to improve both of these properties, decreasing the cost of converting cellulosic biomass to fuels and chemicals.”

Other authors on the study include, from JGI-LANL (at Los Alamos National Laboratory), Thomas Brettin, David Bruce, Chris Detter, Cheryl Kuske, Olga Chertkov, Melissa Jackson, Cliff Han, Monica Misra, Nina Thayer, Ravi Barbote, and Gary Xie; from the JGI-PGF (Production Genomics Facility in Walnut Creek, CA), Jarrod Chapman, Igor Grigoriev, Isaac Ho, Susan Lucas, Nicolas Putnam, Paul Richardson, Daniel Rokhsar, Asaf Salamov and Astrid Terry; and Pacific Northwest National Laboratory’s Scott Baker and Jon Magnuson. Other collaborating institutions include the USDA Forest Products Lab, Oregon State University, University of New Mexico, TU-Vienna, Catholic University of Chile, VTT of Finland, and Universités d’Aix-Marseille I & II.

The U.S. Department of Energy Joint Genome Institute, supported by the DOE Office of Science, unites the expertise of five national laboratories -- Lawrence Berkeley, Lawrence Livermore, Los Alamos, Oak Ridge, and Pacific Northwest -- along with the Stanford Human Genome Center to advance genomics in support of the DOE missions related to clean energy generation and environmental characterization and cleanup. DOE JGI’s Walnut Creek, CA, Production Genomics Facility provides integrated high-throughput sequencing and computational analysis that enable systems-based scientific approaches to these challenges. Additional information about DOE JGI can be found at: http://www.jgi.doe.gov/.