A Pleiotropic Regulator of Secondary Metabolism

Fungi are responsible for the production of many natural products as a result of the use of various biosynthetic gene clusters and pathways. Although numerous of these products are nowadays widely exploited by the biotech and pharmaceutical industry, two main challenges limit the access to new compounds: i) the inability to cultivate diverse producers of natural products in the laboratory and, ii) the fact that a majority of secondary metabolite biosynthesis gene clusters are silent under standard laboratory conditions. To overcome this obstacle, the current project makes use of fungal strains, which are deficient in the gene encoding the recently discovered transcription factor Xylanase promoter binding protein 1 (Xpp1). Xpp1 can be found in various fungi and is functioning as a pleiotropic regulator of secondary metabolism and is involved in the synthesis of small biomolecules. Based on these findings the major aims of the curent project, which is coordinated by Prof. Mach from the Vienna University of Technology is to i) elucidate the regulon of Xpp1 in Trichoderma reesei ii) to analyze the regulatory function of Xpp1 in other other biotechnologically and agriculturally relevant fungal species iii) investigate the molecular mechanisms behind Xpp1 exerting it regulatory function in secondary metabolism Our group will contribute to the project by stable isotope based metabolomics approaches, the untargeted screening of novel fungal secondary metabolites and the annotation of their chemical structure.