Abstract
Traditional growth-based methods for characterizing environmental fungi are biased by selection of culture media and incapable of detecting non-cultivable fungi, which still retain allergenicity and/or pathogenicity. Meanwhile, real-time quantitative polymerase chain reaction (qPCR)-based methods have been recently developed and used to characterize fungal concentrations in environmental samples such as air and house dust. As qPCR-based methods are independent of fungal cultivability or viability, they are expected to be toxicologically more relevant than conventional growth-based methods for assessing health effects caused by environmental fungi. This chapter presents protocols for the collection of environmental fungal samples and subsequent qPCR analysis.
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Acknowledgment
I thank Karen Dannemiller at Yale University for invaluable comments on the manuscript.
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Yamamoto, N. (2013). Real-Time PCR Assay in Fungi. In: Gupta, V., Tuohy, M., Ayyachamy, M., Turner, K., O’Donovan, A. (eds) Laboratory Protocols in Fungal Biology. Fungal Biology. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-2356-0_28
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-2356-0_28
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