Protein targeting and secretion in filamentous fungi. A progress report

Although the application of filamentous fungi, such as Aspergillus niger for the production of extracellular proteins is well established for several decades, hardly any information is available about the molecular mechanisms of the process of protein secretion in these organisms. Two lines of research initiated towards a systematic analysis of the mechanism of protein targeting and secretion are presented in this paper. 1--To study routing and targeting of proteins in filamentous fungi the availability of a versatile reporter/carrier protein will be of considerable importance. Experiments towards the identification of such a protein are presented. 2--In analogy to the situation in Saccharomyces cerevisiae, the availability of defined (conditional) mutations in the secretion pathway will provide very important information about the organisation of the pathway. Therefore, based on results obtained in S. cerevisiae, the cloning of several fungal 'secretion' genes was started. The results of the cloning and characterisation of one of these genes is presented.