Soil Fungi from Extreme Environments with Enzymatic Activity of some Isolated Taxa

Background: Fungi growing in extreme environments are a potency massive reservoir of novel bioactive natural products. Extremophilic fungi can survive in extreme habitats, they can be divided into thermophilic, psychrophilic, acidophilic, alkaliphilic, halophilic, and barophilic fungi. Objective: To employ the fungi isolated from soils and collected from various extreme sites to study their enzymatic activity. Methodology: A total of 161 fungal isolates were isolated from different sites. Morphological identification, molecular identification and enzymatic activity of selected fungal isolates was done. Results: The highest occurrence was for genus Aspergillus and their species starting from A. niger (87.5%) and followed by both A.flavus and A. terreus 62.5%, while A. flavus gave the highest frequency were (27%), followed by A. niger (23.8%) and A. terreus (21.9%) respectively. Six isolates were selected for molecular identification and three of them (Aspergillus cejpii, Penicillium camembertii, Trichoderma asperellum) where selected for enzymatic activity studies.Aspergillus cejpii and Trichoderma asperellum represent new record for Iraqi mycobiota. Conclusion: The study showed that the diversity and high dominance of Aspergillus in different environments. When testing one of its species, Aspergillus cejpii, which was recorded for the first time in Iraq, it did not show any activity to the tested enzymes, while Trichoderma asperellum gave a positive detection for all tested enzymes, perhaps the second species is an extremophilic fungus, while A. cejpii is an immigrant species.