White Rot Fungi

Canola crop is rich in plant biomass. It is considered a major cash crop in North America and a po-tential source for biofuel. We evaluated six strains of white rot basidiomycetes under solid state fermentation (SSF) for their potentials to secrete oxidative and hydrolytic enzymes to biodegrade canola plant biomass (CPB), and release sugars. Fuscoporia gilva and Pleurotus tuberregium pro-duced high amount of laccase (440.86 U/L and 480.63 U/L at day 7), as well as carboxylmethylcel-lulase (CMCase) (4.78 U/mL at day 21 and 3.13 U/mL at day 14) and xylanase (4.48 U/mL and 7.8 U/mL at day 21), respectively. Bjerkandera adusta showed high amount of MnP (50.4 U/L) and peroxidase (64.5 U/L), relative to the other strains. Loss of organic matter peaked after 21 days of incubation in all the tested strains; however, the best result (34.0%) was shown in P. tuberregium. The highest lignin loss was observed in Coriolopsis caperata strains. Among the sugar polymers, hemicellulose was highly degraded by P. tuberregium and P. pulmonarius (4.1 %- 4.6%), while cellulose (3.3 %- 4.3%) was mainly degraded by F. gilva and B. adusta. Glucose was the dominan