SOME FILAMENTOUS FUNGI TESTED FOR CELLULOSE 
DESTROYING POWER" 
FREEMAN M. SCALES 
Every year large quantities of cellulose in the various com- 
binations occurring in plant tissue are returned to the soil. In 
this tissue there is also a great deal of carbohydrate materia], such 
as sugar, starch, pectose, and hemicellulose. These substances are 
more easily available and will under ordinary circumstances be all 
used up before the cellulose is attacked. In spite of this abundance 
of easily available food, at the end of several months practically 
all the plant tissue will be disintegrated and split into soluble 
substances and humus. The destruction of this large quantity 
of cellulose in such a comparatively short time means that the 
cellulose destroying organisms must work very vigorously. By 
special methods of culture, cellulose dissolving bacteria have been 
obtained which hydrolyze this complex material very rapidly, 
but when plating on cellulose agar directly from a soil for the 
isolation of cellulose destroying organisms the filamentous fungi 
usually grow more abundantly and destroy more cellulose than 
do the bacteria. In order to determine whether the addition of 
cellulose to soil makes any difference in the number of molds in it, 
2 per cent of cellulose was added to 200 grams of soil which was 
moistened to the optimum with distilled water and then incubated 
for 30 days at 30°C. The initial count of this soil on cellulose 
agar was 20,000 mold colonies. A check sample which received no 
cellulose, but otherwise had the same treatment as the one described, 
gave on the same kind of media a count of 100,000 mold colonies, 
while the sample which received cellulose showed a mold content of 
200,000,000. It is evident from these data that the filamentous 
fungi are an important factor in the dissolving of cellulose in the 
soil.® 
It is a well known fact that filamentous fungi are very numerous 
in woodland soils and also that they are abundant in acid arable 
* Published by permission of the Secretary of Agriculture. 
149] [Botanical Gazette, vol. 60 
