Take another look at Penicillium, this happens to be the Penicillium roqueforte. On this slide, the organism happens to be growing on agar. That's where the hyphal strand grows into the agar. All these dark areas are where those spores are produced because the reproductive bodies (spores) extend off the agar surface where there is increased oxygen tension. This Penicillium, by the way, is a relative to Penicillium notatum that produces penicillin, the active antibiotic. But this guy (P. roqueforte) produces nice flavors in cheese. This one is producing the spores in here. Oh, I know what I want to tell you. Those of you that make jelly, you use high sucrose in jelly to inhibit bacteria. The sucrose inhibits bacteria due to high osmotic pressure; the high osmotic pressure will not inhibit mold. Then you cap the jelly with some wax to inhibit mold growth, since most common molds are aerobes. By capping it, you preserve the food product. This is just another slide showing you that over here is where the hyphae grow, where there is a high density of oxygen present, these guys pump out here. I was mentioning to someone over lunch that in penicillin production, when you're actually trying to produce large quantities of the antibiotic, you have what we call a fermentation. By the way, physiologist go crazy over industry's use of the term fermentation because fermentation is defined as being anaerobic. When you grow Penicillium to produce penicillin, our major cost is pumping in sterile air. So it's certainly not an anaerobic process. So that's the mold.

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