One new record of Penicillium isolated from central air-conditioning system of hospitals in China

Abstract:

[Objective] The objective of this study was to examine taxonomic position of one Penicillium strains isolated from central air-conditioning systems of hospitals in China. [Methods] Penicillium spores were collected on Sabourand’s agar by the 6-stage Andersen impactor. Then one strain was indetified by analysis of β-tubulin gene and morphological characters. For phylogenetic analyses in MEGA 4.0, β-tubulin gene sequences were analyzed using the maximum parsimony approach of close-neighbor-interchange algorithm, in which the initial trees were obtained with the random addition of sequences (1 000 replicates). [Results] In this study, we made a survey about fungi group in central air-conditioning systems in several hospitals in China. One new record Penicillium bilaiae SW11-6 was isolated from the central air-conditioning system in one hospital in Beijing, China, which was described and illustrated. Macroscopic and microscopic morphology was observed and described. The phylogeny of this new record and related species was constructed based on β-tubulin sequences alignment. The frequency of SW11-6 is the second one in Penicillium in the detected samples. [Conclusion] Utilizing comprehensive approaches of morphological characters and molecular identification, we concluded that we found one new Chinese record species of the Penicillium, strain SW11-6 was identified as P. bilaiae Chalabuda. And whether it will do harm to human’s health needs further studying.