The clinical application of identification of Aspergillus spp.using ITS and β-tubulin gene sequences

Objective To study the clinical application of the ITS and β-tubulin gene regions in identification of Aspergillus spp. Methods One hundred and twenty-four Aspergillus strains that isolated from fungal rhino-sinusitis specimens were collected in Beijing Tongren Hospital, Capital Medical University from July 2007 to January 2010. They were identified by morphological and molecular methods. The first one included traditional culture, slide culture, and microscopic examination after lactophenol cotton blue stain and KOH digestion. The second one was amplifying and sequencing the part of ITS and β-tubulin gene and aligned all the sequences in the GenBank, European Molecular Biology Laboratory nucleotide sequence database, and DNA Data Bank of Japan. Results Of the 56 Aspergillus flavus identified by morphological features, fifty-five isolates were identified as Aspergillus flavus and 1 isolates was Aspergillus parasiticus by the ITS and β-tubulin gene region sequence analysis. In the 37 Aspergillus fumigatus identified by morphological method, and all the 37 isolates were identified as species complex of Aspergillus fumigatus by the ITS region sequence analysis, but through the sequence analysis of β-tubulin gene region, thirty-five isolates were identified as Aspergillus. fumigatus and 2 were Aspergillus lentulus. Twenty-one isolates were identified as Aspergillus versicolor by morphological method, but 16 of them were identified as Aspergillus. versicolor and 5 can not be identified to species level by the ITS region sequence. And by comparative-sequence analysis of β-tubulin gene region, the 5 isolates were identified as Aspergillus sydowii,the other 16 isolates were Aspergillus. versilcolor. Ten isolates were identified as Aspergillus nidulans by morphological features, the ITS and β-tubulin gene region sequence analysis. Conclusions β-tubulin gene sequencing is more suitable for identifying Aspergillus, and could identify Aspergillus spp. to species level Sequences of ITS region could only identify Aspergillus spp. to species complex.