Biodegradation of winery biomass wastes by developing a symbiotic multi-fungal consortium

Australia is sixth largest global wine grape producer with an annual production of 1.75 million metric tonnes (2012-13). Due to poor digestibility and minor phenolic toxicity, winery biomass waste has limited use as either animal feed or compost fertilizer. Fungi are considered as efficient biomass degraders. The results of this PhD study showed that simple pre-treatment process such as autoclaving, combined with mixed fungal consortium application and metabolomics, generated substantial biomass degradation. This degradation generated numerous metabolites such as sugars, alcohols and fatty acids which can be applied to generate biofuel molecules such as bioethanol and medicinally important metabolites.