Chapter 4 

 BIOCHEMISTRY OF FUNGI 



Essentially all that is known regarding the biochemistry of fungi 

 has come from investigations made since the turn of the present 

 century, and the larger proportion of this knowledge has been 

 acquired during the past few years. Interests in these matters have 

 been divided, both the students with purely academic viewpoints 

 and those concerned with industrial applications having been at- 

 tracted. There has resulted from these studies of the biochemistry 

 of fungi, including the yeasts and bacteria, a voluminous litera- 

 ture. In one volume, much less in one chapter, it is impossible for 

 one person to convey adequately the scope of these studies, to 

 indicate the evidences in them of scientific acuity and perspicacity, 

 or to venture prophecies on their implications and applications. 



Before the nineteenth century little about the biochemistry of 

 fungi was common knowledge among mycologists, except per- 

 haps that yeasts produce alcohol and carbon dioxide. Our pres- 

 ent-day concepts of this subject admittedly had their beginning 

 in Pasteur's epoch-making researches on fermentations as accom- 

 plished through the agency of yeasts. To be sure, yeasts were 

 used by man in the making of bread and the preparation of alco- 

 holic drinks long before anything fundamental about them or 

 about their biochemical activities was known. For the develop- 

 ment of industrial uses of fungi, the initial impetus doubtless came 

 from Hansen's classical work with yeasts and from the studies of 

 Wehmer, performed about the same time, on the production of 

 oxalic and citric acid by Penicillium. Such a mass of data on mold 

 biochemistry is now available that only the intrepid would ap- 

 praise it or venture to view it in perspective and to speculate on 

 the many problems that have been brought into focus and that 

 await solution. For an introduction to this subject the excellent 

 summaries of Raistrick (1931), Raistrick et al. (1931), Raistrick 

 (1938), Iwanoff (1932), IwanorT and ZwetkorT (1933, 1936), Bir- 



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