Fungal Biotechnology: Role and Aspects

Abstract

Sustainability has become the prominent necessity in every human event in today’s time, which can initiate from the household and leads to this planet earth. The Earth Summit organized by the United Nations has played the significant role in creating awareness about sustainable development to retort against the natural calamities, due to over-exploitation of natural resources and exponential growth of the human population for centuries. For the quest of sustainability, fungi have emerged as a suitable candidate. Fungi play a pivotal role in fundamental and modern processes of biotechnology. Nowadays many processes such as baking, brewing and the synthesis of alcohols, antibiotics, enzymes, organic acid as well as the additional pharmaceutical product are carried out using fungal bioproducts. Due to recent advances in genomics and rDNA technology, yeast and fungi have attained the forefront position because of their present industrial purposes. In general, the term “mycotechnology” is used, which states about the various roles of fungi with the addition to its impact on biotechnology as well as economy.

Fungi play the significant role in sustaining the health and terrestrial ecosystem. During disastrous event which leads to disruption of the earth ecosystem, fungi prepare themselves to prevail in the future. The aid of fungal population in sustaining the environment is showing promising result. About 90% of plant grows in symbiosis with fungi such as vesicular-arbuscular mycorrhizal (VAM) fungi, mycorrhizae, out of which Glomus is the most exploited genera (Van der Heijden et al. 1998). Fungi persisting on this earth have widespread complex relationship among the range of microbes, which can be arthropods, bacteria and nematodes. The dwelling zone of these fungi is named as the “rhizosphere”.

A fungus belongs to the group of Eukaryotes, which consists of microbes like moulds and yeast along with more familiar mushrooms. All of them are categorized under the kingdom Fungi. The fungi are omnipresent in every environment and play critical role in complex biological processes. Thus, it can work as decomposers, which aid in nutrient cycles, exclusively as symbiont as well as saprotrophs, in disintegrating the organic constituents into inorganic constituents, which gets retraced in the anabolic pathways of metabolic activities taking place in organism as well as plants.

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