Paper accepted: “A seven-membered cell wall related transglycosylase gene family in Aspergillus niger is relevant for cell wall integrity in cell wall mutants with reduced α-glucan or galactomannan”

Today, we learned that our first joint paper from the FunCHI project was accepted for publication in the new journal The Cell Surface which is dedicated to research on ‘transkingdom cell wall biology‘. This is a central part of the doctoral thesis of Tim van Leeuwe who worked in our project under the supervision of Prof. Arthur Ram in Leiden in The Netherlands. From our side, Anna Niehues and Jasper Wattjes were involved who did their doctoral projects in the framework of that project. One of the goals of our project was to modify the fungal cell wall in such a way that the chitin would be more easily extractable. To this end, Tim had deleted all seven crh genes in Aspergillus niger using the CRISPR/Cas technology. These genes are believed to be responsible for the covalent linkages of chitin and glucans in the fungal cell wall, but surprisingly, knocking them out did not lead to a significant phenotype. And as Anna and Jasper found, there are no significant changes in cell wall architecture either. Only when combined with other cell wall mutants did a phenotype become apparent. Thus, these mutations did not help to extract more chitin from the cell walls. There would appear to be other cross links not dependent on the crh genes. So the search continues.