CD Laboratory for Fungal Biotechnology

This CD Laboratory researches the molecular genetics of filamentous fungi (hyphae fungi). The focus is on the basics of adapting the metabolism so that ingredients of interest to Medicine and pharmaceutics can be produced on an industrial scale.

Hyphal fungi are both specialists and hard labourers. They produce antibiotics, immunosuppressants and cholesterol-lowering agents in large industrial plants. Their genetics represent a challenge for research, as many production strains lose their industrially interesting properties and thus their economic significance after just a few generations. As hyphal fungi reproduce asexually, directed breeding is very difficult.

This is where targeted research comes in. Work is being carried out to develop new methods that allow improved industrial production of the desired products in hyphal fungi. This also includes the development of new marker genes that allow easy identification of genetically optimised fungal strains.

Another focus is on the morphology of hyphal fungi. It has long been known that there are close links between the shape of a fungal strain and its metabolic productivity. For this reason, regulatory metabolic networks in hyphal fungi are being elucidated using the latest molecular biological methods. So-called microarrays allow numerous genes to be analysed simultaneously. Under different culture conditions or in different strains, these are expressed differently, i.e. their information is converted into proteins to varying degrees. This allows the interactions between individual genes and their products to be analysed and the relationship between morphology and metabolism to be elucidated.

Overall, current and new methods of applied molecular biology are used to achieve a better understanding of the molecular basis of the secondary metabolism of hyphal fungi. The knowledge gained contributes to the targeted improvement of industrially relevant strains. This research, which is being carried out in the field of fungal oxygen regulation together with the Medicine University of Innsbruck, will ultimately contribute to the optimisation of industrially produced metabolic products in the field of medical applications.