Biochemical differentiation of mycelium and yeast forms of Paracoccidioides brasiliensis by Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy

Abstract

Paracoccidioides brasiliensis the etiological agent of paracoccidioidomycosis, is a dimorphic fungus existing as mycelia in the environment (or at 25 °C in vitro) and as yeast cells in the human host (or at 37 °C in vitro). The most prominent difference between both forms is probably the cell wall polysaccharide, being 1,3-ß-glucan usually found in mycelia and 1,3-α-glucan found in yeasts, but a plethora of other differences have already been described. In this work, we performed a Fourier Transform Infrared Spectroscopy analysis to compare the yeast and mycelia forms of P. brasiliensis and found additional biochemical differences. The analysis of the spectra showed that differences were distributed in chemical bonds of proteins, lipids and carbohydrates.

A clash of kings

“…Metabolically the two states may have a profound effect on the production of fungal metabolites, and it would be good to design methods to determine the sexual state (Almeida et al, 2021;Araújo et al, 2019;Castilho et al, 2012). Plating samples also does not provide sufficient information, as yeast-like cells may grow as mycelium on agar plates and vice versa.…”