Chitin production of mycelia from Mucor circinelloides (Mucor javanicus) was studied with a two-level factorial design in all combinations of the following factors in the culture medium: time of cultivation, concentration of D-glucose, L-asparagine and thiamine. Chitin was characterised by infrared and nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy. The four factors showed statistically significant (9...

The stress-related responses of Mucor circinelloides transformants altered in carotenoid production have been investigated. In zygomycetous fungi β-carotene is the predominant carotenoid, however, in transformants containing the crtW and crtZ astaxanthin biosynthesis genes from Agrobacterium aurantiacum new carotenoid compounds are present. Mucor strains with altered carotenoid content were tre...

Biosurfactants are amphiphilic molecules with surface tension reducing activities. Among biosurfactant producers, fungi have been identified as promising organisms. While many studies investigated production in fungal species from the Ascomycota and Basidiomycota phyla, less is known concerning Mucoromycota phylum. In this context, aim of study was to screen optimize 24 strains, including seven...

The oleaginous fungus, Mucor circinelloides, is one of few fungi that produce high amounts of γ-linolenic acid (GLA); however, it usually only produces <25% lipid. Nevertheless, a new strain (WJ11) isolated in this laboratory can produce lipid up to 36% (w/w) cell dry weight (CDW). We have investigated the potential mechanism of high lipid accumulation in M. circinelloides WJ11 by comparative b...

BACKGROUND γ-Linolenic acid (GLA) is important because of its nutritional value and medicinal applications. Although the biosynthetic pathways of some plant and microbial GLA have been deciphered, current understanding of the correlation between desaturases and GLA synthesis in oleaginous fungi is incomplete. In previous work, we found that a large amount of oleic acid (OA) had not been convert...

Protein kinase A from the fungus Mucor circinelloides shows high affinity interaction between regulatory (R) and catalytic (C) subunits. Its R subunit shows a differential presence of several acidic residues in linker I region, in the amino terminus. Mutants R1, lacking the N-terminal region, and R2, lacking the acidic cluster, were used to analyze its effect on the interaction with the C subun...

Dicer proteins are ribonuclease III enzymes that process double stranded RNA precursors into small RNAs categorized as small interfering RNAs (siRNAs) or microRNAs (miRNAs), which suppress gene expression through the RNA silencing mechanism. We have isolated a dicer-like gene (dcl-1) of Mucor circinelloides, the first gene of this family to be identified in zygomycetes. The dcl-1 mRNA occurred ...

Phycomyces carRA gene encodes a protein with two domains. Domain R is characterized by red carR mutants that accumulate lycopene. Domain A is characterized by white carA mutants that do not accumulate significant amounts of carotenoids. The carRA-encoded protein was identified as the lycopene cyclase and phytoene synthase enzyme by sequence homology with other proteins. However, no direct data ...