Novel players involved in biomass degradation in Trichoderma reesei

Abstract

The ability of the filamentous ascomycete Trichoderma reesei to efficiently degrade lignocellulose was already discovered over 70 years ago. Since then, research on the organism was mainly propelled by the vision, to use its secreted enzymes, to generate biofuels or other products from plant waste material as a sustainable alternative to refined fossil oil. However, currently available enzyme formulations are still not cost efficient and research efforts are ongoing to develop new ways to make these biorefinery concepts economically more efficient. Technological advances including -omics technologies, have led to the identification of several potential novel players in biomass degradation. But the presence of ¿omics data is only powerful, if genes and proteins identified by these technologies are already described. However, this is a clear bottleneck as, in contrast to long-serving ¿old bugs¿ like S. cerevisiae and E. coli, filamentous fungi such as T. reesei still have a plethora of genes with unknown function. To unravel this dormant potential, the study of single genes and their encoding proteins plays a key role in the establishment of novel players in lignocellulose.