Wallemia mellicola

Wallemia mellicola is a xerophilic fungus of the phylum Basidiomycota, described in 2015 upon taxonomic revision of the species Wallemia sebi. A large amount of published research referring to W. sebi was likely actually performed on W. mellicola. An example of this is the sequencing of the W. mellicola genome, which was published under the name of W. sebi. It has a worldwide distribution and is often found in habitats with low accessibility of water, from food preserved with high concentrations of sugar, salt or with drying, to dried straw and house dust. It has rarely been reported as the cause of human infections. Like other species of the same genus, W. mellicola grows at low water activity, however it is not obligately xerophilic and can grow without additional solute in the growth medium. It grows at salt concentrations up to 24% NaCl, 13% MgCl2 and at temperatures between 10 °C and 34 °C. W. mellicola has a compact genome of 9.8 Mb with few repeats, which is one of the smallest ......read more on Wikipedia.