Kontakt 2012, 14(4):497-504 | DOI: 10.32725/kont.2012.049

Methods of detection and identification of mouldsBiomedicine - Review

Vlastimil Dohnal^1,*, Daniel Jun²

¹ Univerzita Hradec Králové, Přírodovědecká fakulta, katedra chemie, Hradec Králové

² Univerzita obrany, Fakulta vojenského zdravotnictví, katedra toxikologie, Hradec Králové

Fibrous micromycetes (moulds) can negatively affect the human or animal health, either as parasites or organisms producing toxic secondary metabolites or due to reducing the nutritional quality of the food contaminated. These facts call for necessary development of new rapid detection techniques, which will be able to reveal the presence of moulds at just the right time.
For the identification, a standard cultivation method can be employed, where particular morphological characters are compared with figures in atlas. This procedure is very time consuming and thus, new molecular-biological, chemical or physical methods are stepwise being investigated and used for this purpose. The polymerase chain reaction and sequencing for the detection of specific genes is thus used. The genetic information also characterizes the metabolism of fibrous micromycetes. It includes a wide spectrum of chemical substances, as e.g. terpenes, polyketides, non-ribosomal peptides, fatty acids, etc. For the general detection, typical products can be used, as e.g. ergosterol or chitin. For more selective identification, it is possible to use volatile organic substances detected by artificial olfactory detectors or chromatographic methods, or specific fatty acids. In terms of physical methods, there is an increased interest in methods of the analysis of graphs obtained for different spectral regions, from the ultraviolet region to the infrared one.
The work offers an outline of these methods and discussion of benefits and drawbacks limiting their use in practice.

Keywords: detection of moulds; mycotoxins; biomarkers; volatile organic substances

Received: March 1, 2012; Accepted: August 27, 2012; Prepublished online: December 21, 2012; Published: December 30, 2012  Show citation