Structural Differences between Fusarium Strains Investigated by FT-IR Spectroscopy

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Ming Nie¹, Jianglan Luo¹, Ming Xiao^1,2*, Jiamin Chen¹, Kan Bao¹, Weiqiong Zhang¹, Jiakuan Chen², and Bo Li²

¹College of Life and Environment Sciences, Shanghai Normal University, Shanghai 200234, PR China; fax: +86-21-6432-4280; E-mail: xiaom88@shtu.edu.cn; nm0928@hotmail.com

²Ministry of Education Key Laboratory for Biodiversity Science and Ecological Engineering, The Institute of Biodiversity Science, Fudan University, Shanghai 200433, PR China; fax: +86-21-6564-2468; E-mail: xiaoming88@263.net

^* To whom correspondence should be addressed.

Received July 6, 2006; Revision received September 5, 2006

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The structural characteristics of Fusarium have received attention from both pure and applied scientists. Because many genes and physiological mechanisms are involved in the development of a particular structure type, this research is complicated. For revealing the structure of macromolecule in these fungal cells, FT-IR spectroscopy combined with multivariate statistical analysis was performed to characterize the structure of protein and polysaccharide of spores and mycelia obtained from different culture medium. The second derivative FT-IR spectra exhibited strain-specific infrared characteristics in the protein secondary structure sensitive amide I region. The region between 750 and 950 cm^-1 assigned to alpha- and beta-glucans was investigated for studied samples. Principal components analysis (PCA) allowed us to separate mycelia into two clusters according to different growth medium, indicating that spectra of strains may have been greatly affected by cultivation conditions.

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KEY WORDS: Fusarium, FT-IR spectroscopy, protein, glucan, chitin, structure

DOI: 10.1134/S0006297907010075

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