Fungal Secretome for Biorefinery: Recent Advances in Proteomic Technology

Fungal biotechnology has been well established in food and healthcare sector, and now being explored for lignocellulosic biorefinery due to their great potential to produce a wide array of extracellular enzymes for nutrient recycling. Due to global warming, environmental pollution, green house gases emission and depleting fossil fuel, fungal enzymes for lignocellulosic biomass refinery become a major focus for utilizing renewal bioresources. Proteomic technologies tender better biological understanding and exposition of cellular mechanism of cell or microbes under particular physiological condition and are very useful in characterizing fungal secretome. Hence, in addition to traditional colorimetric enzyme assay, mass-spectrometry-based quantification methods for profiling lignocellulolytic enzymes have gained increasing popularity over the past five years. Majority of these methods include two dimensional gel electrophoresis coupled to mass spectrometry, differential stable isotope labeling and label free quantitation. Therefore, in this review, we reviewed more commonly used different proteomic techniques for profiling fungal secretome with a major focus on two dimensional gel electrophoresis, liquid chromatography-based quantitative mass spectrometry for global protein identification and quantification. We also discussed weaknesses and strengths of these methodologies for comprehensive identification and quantification of extracellular proteome.