The ability of Humicola fuscoatra MTCC 1409 to pretreat paddy straw for enhancing its digestibility and biogas production was investigated in this study. The potential of pretreatment of paddy straw was studied at regular intervals of 0, 5, 10, 15 and 20 days by determining the change in chemical composition of paddy straw like NDF, ADF, cellulose, hemicellulose, lignin and silica. Results indicated that the pretreatment of paddy straw with culture for 10 days was appropriate for increasing

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... y straw digestibility and biogas production. The pretreatment significantly reduced the concentrations of NDF, ADF, cellulose and hemicellulose in the paddy straw by 16.9, 5.5, 56.1 and 42.9 % respectively. Reducing sugars and hydrolysis rate also increased significantly with pretreatment. These results showed that Humicola fuscoatra is an efficient cellulolytic fungus which is capable of increasing paddy straw digestibility and hence biogas production increased by 27.7% within 10 days pretreatment. The microscopic structural changes were examined by scanning electron microscopy (SEM) under reasonable conditions.