The critical first step towards this goal is to catalog all the genes that constitute the repertoire of fungal physiological capacity, and to associate these genes with biological function. Once we have determined the road map for this best understood organism, we will be in a position to acquire and interpret genome information from the more economically important but vastly unexplored fungi including industrially important fungi, cultivated strains, and plant and animal pathogens - organisms that comprise the bulk of the known species. Fungi are known to infect nearly all food crops and represent the most universal and costly pathogens. Filamentous fungi are widely used as organisms for basic research. Industrial production of chemicals by filamentous fungi constitutes a ca.
Fungi are of major importance in basic research.
They are genuine eukaryotes having cell and genome structures and metabolic organization similar to that of other eukaryotes like plants and animals. The Nobel Prize has been awarded for research on one filamentous fungus, Neurospora crassa. The information encoded in the genomic DNA of an organism contains the entire repertoire of the organism's metabolic and developmental capacity - everything that it can do or become. It represents the pinnacle of an organism's evolutionary growth over eons of history, where variation induced by mutation has been refined in the crucible of evolution. By determining the sequence of a genome, all of the proteins encoded by the organism can be identified and all of the developmental and metabolic potential of an organism becomes available for manipulation both in that organism and, potentially, for re-engineering in any other organism.