Patent ID: 8642290

Claim:
A method of producing a polypeptide, comprising: (a) cultivating a fungal host cell useful for the production of a polypeptide, in a nutrient medium suitable for production of the polypeptide and optionally; (b) recovering the polypeptide from the nutrient medium of the mutant cell; wherein the host cell is a mutant of a parent cell, in which the mutant: produces more of a transcriptional activator than the parent cell when cultured under the same conditions wherein the transcriptional activator is encoded by an isolated nucleic acid sequence coding for an isolated polypeptide having transcriptional activity on a protease promoter, wherein said polypeptide is selected from the group consisting of: (a) a polypeptide having transcriptional activity on a protease promoter comprising the amino acid sequence of SEQ ID NO: 3; (b) a polypeptide having transcriptional activity on a protease promoter comprising a peptide fragment, said peptide fragment having at least 80% sequence identity with SEQ ID NO:22; (c) a polypeptide having transcriptional activity on a protease promoter comprising peptide fragments, said peptide fragments having at least 80% sequence identity with both SEQ ID NO:22 and SEQ ID NO: 4; and (d) a polypeptide having transcriptional activity on a protease promoter comprising (i) an amino acid sequence which has at least 90% sequence identity with the amino acid sequence of SEQ ID NO: 3 and comprising (ii) a peptide fragment, said peptide fragment comprising the amino acid sequence: EWAHL(X) 5-20 ST, wherein “X” represents any amino acid and the range 5-20 represents the number of “X” found; and comprises a DNA sequence encoding the polypeptide, the transcription of which is activated by the transcriptional activator.