Recently, a wide variety of roles of oxalic acid (oxalate) in wood decay systems have been receiving much attention. Copper tolerance of wood-rotting basidiomycetes has been believed to be due to the detoxification of copper wood preservatives by oxalate produced by these fungi. However, biochemical mechanism of oxalate biosynthesis in relation to physiology of wood-rotting fungi has not been elucidated although two oxalate-forming enzymes, oxaloacetase and glyoxylate dehydrogenase, have been studied in our laboratory. Recently, a new role of glyoxylate cycle in oxalate biosynthesis in wood- rotting fungi has been presented, and the cycle commonly occurred to varying extents among the fungi although they were grown on glucose. Enzymatic analyses showed that isocitrate was cleaved by isocitrate lyase in the glyoxylate cycle rather than oxidized by isocitrate dehydrogenase in tricarboxylic acid (TCA) cycle, and the fungi were found to lack a normal TCA cycle due to the absence of - ketoglutarate dehydrogenase. It is noteworthy that glucose was efficiently converted to oxalate in a theoretical yield of about 80%, accumulating in the culture media of F. palustris. The results further indicate that acetyl-CoA derived from glucose was not completely oxidized to CO2 in TCA cycle but was mainly converted to oxalate with help of the other coupling metabolic cycles, including glyoxylate cycle. Formation of oxalate from several intermediary metabolites using cell-free extracts of F. palustris confirmed that oxalate is also the final product of the metabolic pathway in the in vitro system. Thus, it is proposed as a new concept that most of copper-tolerant brown-rot fungi may acquire the energy by oxidizing glucose to oxalate, i.e. oxalate fermentation expressed in the following equation; Glucose + 5O2 --> 2 Oxalate + 2CO2 + 4H2O.

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