The term " soft rot " was originally used by Findlay and Savory (1954) to describe a specific type of wood decay caused by Ascomycetes and Deuteromycetes which typically produce chains of cavities within the S2 layer of soft- and hardwoods in terrestrial and aquatic environments (Liese 1955), for example when the wood-fill in cooling towers became destroyed despite water saturation, and when poles broke, although they were protected against Basidiomvcetes. About 300 species (Seehann et al. 1975) to some 1,600 examples of ascomvcete and deuteromvcete fungi (Eaton and Hale 1993) cause soft rot, e.g., Chaeromium globosurn (Takahashi 1978), Hurnicola spp., Lecythophora hoffrnannii, Monodictys putredinis, Paecilornyces spp., and Thielavia terrestris. Soft-rot fungi differ from brown-rot and white-rot Basidiomycetes by grow-ing mainly inside the woody cell wall trate, starting from the tracheidal lumina., by means of thin perforation hyphae of less than 0.5 pm thickne
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