were described in different stages of growth. It was observed that the fungal filaments (Fig. 1a) produce pigments in the presence of oxygen (Fig. 1b), which was accompanied by the release of a fragrant smell. The orange hue created by the isolate 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.