Filamentous fungi rank with bacteria as the most serious human and animal pathogens. Because they are eukaryotes, treatment of opportunistic infections by fungi poses special risks and challenges not encountered with bacterial infections. Pharmaceutical manufacture using fungi constitutes a multi-billion dollar per year industry. Penicillin and similar beta-lactams, all produced in fungi, are the world's largest selling antibiotics. Industrial production of chemicals by filamentous fungi constitutes a ca.
Fungi are of major importance in basic and biomedical research.
They are genuine eukaryotes having cell and genome structures and metabolic organization similar to that of other eukaryotes including plants and animals. However, because they have smaller genomes and are eminently experimentally tractable, fungi are universally used as model organisms for understanding all aspects of basic cellular regulation. These regulatory networks include cell cycle progression, gene regulation, circadian timing, recombination, secretion, and multicellular development. The Nobel Prize has been awarded for research using one filamentous fungus, Neurospora crassa. The information encoded in the genomic DNA of an organism describes the entire repertoire of the organism's metabolic and developmental capacity - everything that it can do or become .