Fungal Metabolites in the Nineteenth Century

Fungi were recognized as the cause of several serious plant diseases in the middle of the 19th century. The need to control fungal diseases of plants, such as Plasmopara viticola infections of vines, led to the development by Millardet in 1883 of Bordeaux mixture (copper sulfate and lime). 

The scale on which many natural product degradations were carried out in the late 19th century and the early 20th century precluded much structural work on fungal metabolites. With a few exceptions, fungal material was not available on a scale that would permit the isolation of the gram quantities of natural product that were used for structural studies in the days preceding spectroscopic methods. 

Several simple acids, such as oxalic and citric, were isolated from Aspergillus niger in 1891-1893. Commercial methods for the microbiological production of citric acid (1.9) were developed in the early 1920s. 

During the 19th and early 20th centuries there had been several reports of poisoning arising from mouldy wall paper. In a study of microbiological 

There are, however, several milestones in the development of the penicillins 

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