The vision of the European common research programme for 2014–2020, called Horizon 2020, is to create a smarter, more sustainable and more inclusive society. However, this is a global endeavor, which is important for mycologists all over the world because it includes a special role for fungi and fungal products. After ten years of research on industrial scale conversion of biowaste, the conclusion is that the most efficient and gentle way of converting recalcitrant lignocellulosic materials into high value products for industrial purposes, is through the use of fungal enzymes. Moreover, fungi and fungal products are also instrumental in producing fermented foods, to give storage stability and improved health. Climate change will lead to increasingly severe stress on agricultural production and productivity, and here the solution may very well be that fungi will be brought into use as a new generation of agricultural inoculants to provide more robust, more nutrient efficient, and more drought tolerant crop plants. However, much more knowledge is required in order to be able to fully exploit the potentials of fungi, to deliver what is needed and to address the major global challenges through new biological processes, products, and solutions. This knowledge can be obtained by studying the fungal proteome and metabolome; the biology of fungal RNA and epigenetics; protein expression, homologous as well as heterologous; fungal host/substrate relations; physiology, especially of extremophiles; and, not the least, the extent of global fungal biodiversity. We also need much more knowledge and understanding of how fungi degrade biomass in nature.The projects in our group in Aalborg University are examples of the basic and applied research going on to increase the understanding of the biology of the fungal secretome and to discover new enzymes and new molecular/bioinformatics tools.However, we need to put Mycology higher up on global agendas, e.g. by positioning Mycology as a candidate for an OECD Excellency Program. This could pave the way for increased funding of international collaboration, increased global visibility, and higher priority among decision makers all over the world.

The on-site production of cell wall degrading enzymes is an important strategy for the development of sustainable bio-refinery processes. This study concerns the optimization of production of plant cell wall-degrading enzymes produced by Trichoderma asperellum. A comparative secretome analysis was performed on T. asperellum growing on PDA agar, wheat bran and duckweed, respectively. T. asperellum proved to be able to produce a wide enzyme profile, including both depolymerization and debranching enzymes, mainly consisting of hemi-cellulases. The secretome analysis showed specific glycoside hydrolase-induction on duckweed compared with growth on wheat bran and PDA, including a GH62 α-L-arabinofuranosidase, a promising candidate enzyme for the degradation of duckweed. The enzyme cocktail from T. asperellum proved capable of degrading pretreated duckweed, obtaining up to 60% of the theoretical glucose yield, making it a potential candidate for on-site enzyme production.

Trichoderma asperellum is a filamentous fungus that is able to produce and secrete a wide range of extracellular hydrolytic enzymes used for plant cell wall degradation. The Trichoderma genus has attracted considerable attention from the biorefinery industry due to the production of cell wall degrading enzymes and strong secretion ability of this genus. Here we report extensive transcriptome analysis of plant cell wall degrading enzymes in T. asperellum. The production of cell wall degrading enzymes by T. asperellum was tested on a range of cellulosic materials under various conditions. When T. asperellum was grown on wheat bran, the greatest range of enzymes activity was detected and a total of 175 glycoside hydrolases from 48 glycoside hydrolase families were identified in the transcriptome. The glycoside hydrolases were identified on a functional level using the bioinformatical tool Peptide Pattern Recognition enabling an efficient enzyme discovery. This was furthermore used to re-annotate CAZymes present in five publically available Trichoderma species, hereby elucidating differences in CAZymes on a functional level in contrary to glycoside hydrolase family level. This comparison supports the theory that the glycoside hydrolases have evolved from a common ancestor, followed by a specialization in which saprotrophic fungi such as T. reesei and T. longibrachiatum lost a significant number of genes including several glycoside hydrolases.