It was observed that the fungal filaments (Fig. 1a) produce
pigments in the presence of oxygen
(Fig. 1b), C11 confirms the production of secondary metabolites. The perithecial hairs appear and become morenumerous and darker on the older cultures (Fig. 1c).
This fungus was identified based on the analysis of the nucleotide
sequence of the nuclear ribosomal ITS1-5.8-ITS2 region
(630 bp amplicon). The analysis of DNA sequence similarity among
sequences lodged in GenBank revealed that the ITS region of C11
have a 97% homology to that of C. globosum reference strains
(GenBank accession numbers KJ472923). Fig. 2 presents the
phylogenetic dendrogram obtained for this strain.
The genus Chaetomium is a representative model of the cellulosic
soft rot fungi. Indeed, the species C. globosum has a broad
range of applications in agriculture and industry. It has been used as
a biocontrol agent against pathogenic microbes (Qi et al., 2011).
Furthermore, C. globosum was potentially applied for producing
biofuel from lignocellulosic materials (Longoni et al., 2012).
Although, this strain has a broad range of applications but few
research works have incorporated it such an agent suitable to
degrade and decolorize an ITE contaminated by dyes.