Organism Analysis

First Step

Establishing a confident identification of a fungal species and its general safety in the environment are the essential first steps prior to agricultural and industrial use and dictate the necessity for further testing. Thus, an assessment on the safety of Trichoderma atroviride is necessary.

Safety

According to the grading of ATCC(American Type Culture Collection), Trichoderma atroviride is a grade 1 organism, which means that it is safe to use in almost all conditions.Although there are a few reports of infections of other Trichoderma species, for example, T. longibrachiatum, T. harzianum, T. koningii, T. pseudokoningii, T. citrinovirde, and T. viride were identified from infections of a peritoneal dialysis patient, immunocompromised transplant recipients, leukemia patients after bone marrow transplantation, in brain abscesses and in HIV patients, no documented evidence of T. atroviride causing disease or allergy in healthy humans has been reported.

Disadvantages

As most filamentous fungi does, Trichoderma atroviride produce lots of spores, which may cause irritation to skin, eyes and respiration tract if handled improperly. What’s worse, the production of spores enables the engineered Trichoderma to diffuse quickly, causing exogenous gene to escape, so we made effort to interfere the production of spores, trying to reduce such influence to a minimum level.