Fungi for Biofuels
To highlight one of our translation projects, we wanted to work with Berkeley's Energy Biosciences Institute to find as many fungi as possible that naturally convert plant cell walls to fermentable sugars. We applied a high-throughput, dilution technique developed for the pharmaceutical industry to cultivating fungi that decompose leaves of Miscanthus and sugarcane. From 4800 cultures we found 100 species of decomposers [Shrestha et al. 2011] and subsequent research has shown that many of these fungi bioconvert Miscanthus faster than the current industry leaders.