Over the period of last two decades, there has been significant resurgence in solid-state fermentation due to the numerous benefits it offers, especially in the engineering and environmental aspects. SSF has shown much promise in the development of several bioprocesses and products. This resurgence gained further momentum during the last 5-6 years with the developments in fundamental and applied aspects. A good deal of information has been generated in published literature and patented information. Several commercial ventures have come up based on SSF in different parts of the world. The contents are organized into four parts: Part 1 deals with the General and Fundamentals aspects of SSF; Part 2 deals with the production of bulk chemicals and products such as enzymes, organic acids, spores and mushrooms in SSF; Part 3 is on the use of SSF for specialty chemicals such as gibberellic acid, antibiotics and other pharmaceutically valuable secondary metabolites, pigments, and aroma compounds; Part 4 deals with the use of SSF miscellaneous application such as SSF for food and feed applications, agro-industrial residues as substrates in SSF and the production of silage and vermicompost.

This treatise is focused on early aspects of fungal pathogenesis in plant and animal hosts. Our aim in choosing the topics and contributors was to demonstrate common approaches to studies of fungal-plant and fungal-animal interactions, particularly at the biochemical and molecular Ievels. For example, the initial events of adh«sion of fungal spores to the exposed surface tissues of the host are essential for subsequent invasion of the plant or animal and establishment of pathogenesis. A point of consensus among investigators who have directed their attention to such events in plants, insects, and vertebrates isthat spore adhesion to the host cuticle or epithelium is more than a simple binding event. lt is a complex and potentially pivotal process in fungal-plant interactions which "may involve the secretion of ftuids that prepare the infection court for the development of morphological stages of the germling" and subsequent invasion of the host (Nicholson and Epstein, Chapter 1). The attachment of the fungal propagule to the arthropod cuticle is also "mediated by the chemical components present on the outer layer of the spore wall and the epicuticle . . . . Initial attachment may be reinforced further by either the active secretion of adhesive materials or the modification of spore wall materiallocated at the [fungal spore arthropod] cuticle interface (Boucias and Pendland, Chapter 5).

This book is about the growth and differentiation processes underlying the growth and differentia of filamentous fungi. The impetus for this work tion of fungi and that it provides the reader with stems from our perception that the coverage of adequate source references for further information. this highly diverse and important group of organ It is estimated conservatively that there are more isms has been neglected in recent years, despite than 1. 5 million species of fungi - more than five many significant advances in our understanding of times the number of vascular plants and second the underlying mechanisms of growth. This situ only in diversity to the insects. The extreme ation contrasts with the treatment of Saccharomyces diversity of form in the fungi has always been a cerevisiae, for example, which because of its ideal source of inspiration for mycologists. This book is properties for genetic analyses, has established concerned mainly with those systems that have itself as the model eukaryote for the analysis of the been well characterized from the biochemical, cell cycle, and basic studies of biochemical and physiological or genetic points of view. Although genetic regulation. This book does not deal with it has not been possible to illustrate the breadth of the detailed growth phYSiology of S.

Fungal Morphogenesis brings together, for the first time, the full scope of fungal developmental biology.

Exegi monumentum ael'e perennius. The monument I have built will last longer than bronze. Horace My previous book, "Chitin", (1977) was listed by the publisher, as a "key research book", among the most requested books by libraries. It received favorable comments from. each of the journals which reviewed it, Science, 198, 28 Oct. 1977, Physiological Entomology, 2(4), Dec. 1977, The Canadian Institute of Food Science and Technology Journal, April 1978, The Quarterly Review of Biology, 53:361, 1978, Oceanographic Abstracts, 15:182, 1979, Annales de Zoologie-Ecologie Animale, 11:127, 1979, and Enzyme & Microbial Technology, 2, 1980. The variety of these journals testifies to the interdisci plinary character of chitin studies. "Chitin" has really been a landmark, to use the definition given by Science, because it stimulated interest in the less known polysaccharides and in modified chitins, besides chitin itself, to the point that three International Conferences on Chitin / Chitosan were convened (Boston, U. S. A. 1977, Sapporo, Japan 1982 and Senigallia, Italy 1985). In convening the 3rd International Conference on Chitin / Chitosan (1-4 April 1985), one of the main objectives was the preparation of the present book. While the proceedings of the previous two Conferences were very valuable, they did not appear in any book catalogs and this severely Ii mi ted their distribution.