Carbon utilization profile of a thermophilic fungus, Thermomyces lanuginosus using phenotypic microarray

The thermophilic filamentous fungus, Thermomyces lanuginosus produces the largest amount of xylanase reported. In addition to this, it expresses large amount of other enzymes that have been used industrially or have academic interest. Thus, this fungus has a potential to be applied for biomass conversion to produce biofuel or other applications. In this study, the Biolog system was used to characterize the utilisation and growth of T. lanuginosus on 95 carbon sources. The carbohydrates based compounds, both single sugars and oligosaccharide, showed the best utilisation profile, with the pentose sugar xylose inducing the highest growth, followed by trehelose, raffinose, D-mannose turanose fructose and glucose. Among oligosaccharides, sucrose had the highest mycelium formation followed by stachyose, maltose, maltotriose, glycogen and dextrin. Interestingly the fungus also grew well on cellobiose suggesting that this fungus can produce cellulose hydrolysing proteins. D-alanine was the best amino acid to promote fungal growth while the effect of other amino acids tested was similar to the control. These results demonstrate the ability of this fungus to grow relatively well on most plant based compounds thus making this fungus a possible candidate for plant biomass conversion which can be applied to a number of biotechnological applications including biofuel production.