MOLECULAR IDENTIFICATION OF PANUS STRIGELLUS ISOLATED FROM SAN RAFAEL RESERVE, PARAGUAY

GONZALEZ CORIA, JC; DAMUS MELGAREJO, ME; BICH, GA; CASTRILLO, ML

Modalidad virtual

Congreso; 1st Latin American Congress of Women in Bioinformatics and Data Science 2020; 2020

Paraguay is characterized by having a rich biological diversity. Among the four large ecoregions it presents is the Atlantic Forest of Alto Paraná (Bosque Atlántico del Alto Paraná ? BAAPA). Worldwide the BAAPA is considered one of the regions with the highest biodiversity, the San Rafael Reserve is the second largest remnant of this region in Paraguay. San Rafael Reserve presents a wide diversity of environments, where the great diversity of species of plants, fish, birds, mammals, reptiles and amphibians have been studied. But, until know, the study of fungal diversity for these regions is very limited. The objective of this work was to molecularly identify with ITS markers a fungal strain coded as B6 collected from the San Rafael reserve with biotechnological potential. The fungal was isolated using Potato Dextrose agar (PDA) and incubated at 28 °C for 3-7 days. The genomic DNA was isolated using a standardized protocol for fungi. The DNA quality was checked and amplified using ITS1 (5'-TCCgTAggTgAACCTgCgg-3') and ITS4 (5'-TCCTCCgCTTATTgATATgC-3') primers. The ITS sequence data was compared with those existing in the databases, using the BLAST (Basic Local Alignment Search Tool) of the NCBI (National Center for Biotechnology Information) and the Fungal Barcoding database. It was verified that the fungal isolate corresponded with high percentage of identity (95%) to Panus strigellus sequences in the NCBI database, and 100% similarity to P. strigellus sequences in the Fungal Barcoding curated database. P. strigellus is an edible mushroom and produces antimicrobial metabolites, thus is important component in food industry because plays a key role as natural antimicrobial in food. Furthermore, because it belongs to the group of white rot fungi, it is capable of synthesizing laccase, an enzyme that is intensively used in biotechnological processes.