Enabling community-based metrology for wood-degrading fungi

Abstract

Background: Lignocellulosic biomass could support a greatly-expanded bioeconomy. Current strategies for using biomass typically rely on single-cell organisms and extensive ancillary equipment to produce precursors for downstream manufacturing processes. Alternative forms of bioproduction based on solid-state fermentation and wood-degrading fungi could enable more direct means of manufacture. However, basic methods for cultivating wood-degrading fungi are often ad hoc and not readily reproducible. Here, we developed standard reference strains, substrates, measurements, and methods sufficient to begin to enable reliable reuse of mycological materials and products in simple laboratory settings. Results:We show that a widely-available and globally-regularized consumer product (Pringles ™ ) can support the growth of wood-degrading fungi, and that growth on Pringles ™ -broth can be correlated with growth on media made from a fully-traceable and compositionally characterized substrate (National Institute of Standards and Technology Reference Material 8492 Eastern Cottonwood Whole Biomass Feedstock). We also establish a Relative Extension Unit (REU) framework that is designed to reduce variation in quantification of radial growth measurements. So enabled, we demonstrate that five laboratories were able to compare measurements of wood-fungus performance via a simple radial extension growth rate assay, and that our REU-based approach reduced variation in reported measurements by up to ~ 75%. Conclusions:Reliable reuse of materials, measures, and methods is necessary to enable distributed bioproduction processes that can be adopted at all scales, from local to industrial. Our community-based measurement methods incentivize practitioners to coordinate the reuse of standard materials, methods, strains, and to share information supporting work with wood-degrading fungi.

Growing a circular economy with fungal biotechnology: a white paper

“…Characterising organisms, substrates and production environments in real-time across orders of magnitude in the scale of space and time could accelerate the development of advanced fungal products while, simultaneously, benefitting basic science and the engineering of biological systems. As an example, standard metrological materials, such as well-characterised 1 cm 3 units of mycelium material, and metrological methods could help to co-ordinate practitioners across locations and resource settings, reduce manufacturing costs, reduce time to market and disseminate best practices [150].…”

Trade-off between Plasticity and Velocity in Mycelial Growth

“…Filamentous fungi play a major role in degradation of biopolymers found in nature for organic material recycling ( 45 , 46 ). Some fungi are useful in biotechnology and traditional food fermentation ( 33 , 47 ), where solid-state cultivation is especially important ( 48 ).…”

Raman Micro­spectroscopy and Imaging of Filamentous Fungi

“…In the process of extending hyphae, fungi secrete various extracellular enzymes that break down organic matter in the surrounding environment, which is then absorbed by fungi as nutrients. In nature, filamentous fungi play a vital role as decomposers and are essential for the recycling of organic material (Treseder and Lennon, 2015;Perez et al, 2020). Filamentous fungi include species such as kōji (Aspergillus oryzae), which are used in the production of traditional fermented food, including sake, soy sauce, and miso (Takeshita, 2020;Yasui et al, 2020).…”