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Identification of Yeast and Fungi

Ribosomal DNA cistron, containing small (18S or SSU) and large (26S/28S or LSU) subunits and the internal transcribed spacer region (rRNA ITS), has been long used as alternative to mitochondrial genes for identification of fungi (Seifert 2009; Begerow et al. 2010). Despite the progress in developing molecular tools for identification of Fungi, no common DNA marker (barcode) was available. Recently, the utility as DNA-barcodes of five most commonly used gene regions was evaluated (Schoch et al. 2012). As the result, the ITS region was selected to be the first common DNA-barcode for Fungi.

DSMZ offers the following identification packages

  • basic identification of fungal and yeast cultures using sequencing of the ITS region.
  • identification using a suitable additional DNA-markers (CAMTUB,RPB1TEF1ACT) which should be applied to perform a more precise identification of commonmoulds such as Penicillium and Aspergillus as well as Cladosporium, Fusarium, and Trichoderma.
  • phylogenetic analysis. Molecular identification will be based on a genetic marker which will be chosen depending on the phylogenetic clade the studied strain belongs to. Phylogenetic placement will be performed using Neighbor Joining (NJ) and Maximum Likelihood (ML) algorithms.

Required material: Customers will need to provide a living culture. If it turns out, that the provided culture is not pure and an isolation becomes necessary, this will be charged separately.

Download the service order form here.

PD Dr. Christiane Baschien

Group leader

Dr. Andrey Yurkov

Group leader

References

  1. Seifert KA (2009) Progress towards DNA barcoding of fungi. Mol Ecol Resour. 9 s1, 83-89.
  2. Schoch CL, Seifert KA, Huhndorf S, Robert V, Spouge JL, Levesque CA, Chen W, and Fungal Barcoding Consortium (2012) Nuclear ribosomal internal transcribed spacer (ITS) region as a universal DNA barcode marker for Fungi. Proc Natl Acad Sci USA. 109, 6241-6246.
  3. Stielow JB, Levesque, CA, Seifert KA, et al. (2015). One fungus, which genes? Development and assessment of universal primers for potential secondary fungal DNA barcodes. Persoonia: Molecular Phylogeny and Evolution of Fungi, 35, 242.