Fungi have the ability to transform organic materials into a rich and diverse set of useful products and provide distinct opportunities for tackling the urgent challenges before all humans. Fungal biotechnology can advance the transition from our petroleum-based economy into a bio-based circular economy and has the ability to sustainably produce resilient sources of food, feed, chemicals, fuels, textiles, and materials for construction, automotive and transportation industries, for furniture and beyond. Fungal biotechnology offers solutions for securing, stabilizing and enhancing the food supply for a growing human population, while simultaneously lowering greenhouse gas emissions. Fungal biotechnology has, thus, the potential to make a significant contribution to climate change mitigation and meeting the United Nation's sustainable development goals through the rational improvement of new and established fungal cell factories. The White Paper presented here is the result of the 2nd Think Tank meeting held by the EUROFUNG consortium in Berlin in October 2019. This paper highlights discussions on current opportunities and research challenges in fungal biotechnology and aims to inform scientists, educators, the general public, industrial stakeholders and policymakers about the current fungal biotech revolution.

The areA gene, which mediates nitrogen metabolite repression in the fungus Aspergillus nidulans, lies sufficiently close to a telomere that no indispensable gene can be distal to it. We were able therefore to exploit the existence of a near terminal pericentric inversion to devise a method for cloning areA plus the region beyond it towards the telomere. In crosses heterozygous for this inversion a class of duplication‐deficient progeny lacking areA and the region centromere‐distal to it is obtained. We, therefore, sought clones from an A. nidulans gene library in lambda Charon 4 able to hybridize to total genomic DNA from a wild‐type strain but not to that from a duplication‐deficiency strain. A clone, containing an 11.6‐kb insert, which hybridised weakly to duplication‐deficiency DNA, overlapped chromosome breakpoints of three different aberration‐associated areA alleles and was able to transform an areA mutant to areA+. Southern blotting and genetic analysis established that the transforming sequence had integrated in the region centromere distal to areA. The cloning method yielded other clones from the region centromere‐distal to areA which were used to show that the translocation associated with a mutant areA allele is reciprocal rather than non‐reciprocal, a fact which could not be established by classical genetics. Finally, analysis of the cloned portion of the dispensable region centromere‐distal to areA indicates that this region contains at least 0.5% of the A. nidulans genome.

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Globally, one in nine people suffer from undernourishment with evidence that this number is increasing. Additionally, due to the projected 50% increase in global population, the demand in worldwide animal-sourced...

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