Morphological and Molecular Study of Different Penicillium Species

Penicillium is a genus of ascomycetous fungi of major importance in the environment, food and drug production. It produces penicillin, a molecule that is used as an antibiotic, this kills or stops the growth of certain kinds of bacteria inside the body. In the present investigation morphological characterization of Penicillium species was carried out in two different media (PDA and Czapek Dox). Morphological characteristics of microbes may be influence by environmental factor and any mutations at the genome can’t be investigated by morphological marker so here one additional step (molecular markers reveal characterization) has been taken to overcome this type of problem to characterize some Penicillium species. The polymorphism at the molecular level was studied by random amplified polymorphic DNA (RAPD) marker technique and variation in the internal transcribed spacer (ITS) region of ribosomal DNA (rDNA). In our study all selected 20 random primers showed polymorphism and generated total 252 RAPD fragments of which 83.73% were polymorphic. The number of amplification products produced by each primer were varied from 4-16 with an average of 10.55. The sizes of amplified fragments were ranged from 218-2939 bp. Pair wise genetic similarity estimated the range from 0.20-0.80 Jaccords coefficient. All selected Penicillium species were grouped into four major clusters. Penicillium purpurogenum and Penicillium notatum was closest species in our study and as expected not higher but moderate level of similarity was found among all selected Penicillium species.