Previous studies on physiology of wood rotting fungi have mostly focused on the metabolisms of carbon and nitrogen sources. On the other hand, despite of the biological importance of minerals such as sulfur, our knowledge of their metabolic systems is limited. The sulfur source for wood-rotting fungi has been thought to be water-soluble sulfur compounds such as sulfate esters and cysteine, which are present in very small amounts in wood. Recently, our research group has shown that filamentous ascomycetous fungus isolated from soil have the ability to degrade carbonyl sulfide (COS), which is a gaseous sulfur compound, and it can use COS as a sulfur source. Based on the background, in the present study, we hypothesized that the wood rotting fungi also uses a gaseous COS in the air, to grow in wood. In order to prove this hypothesis, we measured the COS-degrading activity of nine wood rotting fungi (brown-rot fungi Gloeophyllum trabeum, Coniophora puteana, Fomitopsis palustris, Fomitopsis pinicola, Neolentinus suffrutescens, Wolphiporia cocos and Serpula lacrymans, and white-rot fungi Trametes versicolor and, Pleurotus ostreatus) and found that all of them had COS-degrading activity. Among the above fungi, G. trabeum, a model brown-rot fungus, was used to investigate the effect of COS addition on the growth of the fungus. In addition, to clarify the effect of COS addition on metabolites, metabolome analysis focusing on sulfur-containing compounds was conducted, and several sulfur-containing metabolites and compounds involved in sulfur metabolism were detected. These results suggest the existence of a novel sulfur acquisition pathway using gaseous COS by wood rotting fungi

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