Wheat is one of the world's most abundant and essential food crops. It covers a significant area of the earth's surface, higher than any other plant, and tends to be among the top strategic crops. Wheat contamination with fungi leads to rapid deterioration of quantity and quality of wheat products. Many of those fungi are potential mycotoxins producers. This study aimed to isolate and identify fungi that contaminating the wheat grains from the Misurata Agricultural Research Center area and the South Region of Libya. Fungi contaminating wheat grains were isolated on Potato Dextrose Agar (PDA) and identified by culture characteristics and microscopically. Fungal filtrates of two fungal isolates, Aspergillus niger and Rhizopus sp., were tested for their effects on the germination and seedlings of wheat grains. Furthermore, the effect of acetonic extracts of Black pepper (Piper nigrum) on the growth of the isolated fungi was also investigated. Ten types of fungi belonging to four genera were isolated and identified. The germination rate of wheat grains irrigated with the filtrate of A. niger and Rhizopus sp. was 20% and 80% respectively, compared with 100% of the control grains, which were irrigated with water. The culture filtrates of both A. niger and Rhizopus sp. affect not the only percentage of grains germination but also the morphology of wheat seedlings. It adversely affected the length of the radicles and coleoptiles. The acetone extract of P. nigrum showed inhibitory effect (85.7% ± 3.7 and 44.0% ± 3.1) on the germination of A. niger and Rhizopus sp. respectively. This study concludes that fungal secretions have pathogenic effects on plant growth, which can lead to potential health risks for the human population. Biological control such as Piper nigrum extracts can be an alternative to chemical pesticides for controlling fungal pathogens and their secretions.
Mycotoxins are a variety of critical secondary metabolites for the defense, that produced by multiple types of fungi. These metabolites are toxins where metabolic pathways that produce these toxins are found in adjacent gene groups in the fungal genome when they have adequate environmental and dietary conditions. Mainly, they found in commodities stored by the wrong ways. Mycotoxins are the most potent known toxins that cause serious diseases with minimal concentrations. Genetic diversity was detected using polymorphic randomized amplification technique for DNA fragments between fungal isolates from different crops. This review article aims to review the current status of genetically diverse of mycotoxigenic fungi in various contaminated food. Several studies that have focused on the determination of prevalence and frequency of varies types of toxic fungi were reviewed. Also, the articles that study the toxicity of stored crops such as cereals and oilseeds were considered. The high contrast between findings of these works was presented in terms of the genetic diversity of fungal isolates produced toxins. Aspergillus, Fusarium, and Penicillium were observed among the most common fungus producing toxins. This study which derived from previous researches observed that Aflatoxin was the most toxin produced by most fungi. Aspergillus was the most genetically modified fungus, carrying the most genes responsible for producing the fungal toxins.
Background: A large number of undiscovered fungal species still exist on earth, which can be useful for bioprospecting, particularly for single cell oil (SCO) production. Mortierella is one of the significant genera in this field and contains about hundred species. Moreover, M. alpina is the main single cell oil producer at commercial scale under this genus. Methods: Soil samples from four unique locations of North-East Libya were collected for the isolation of oleaginous Mortierella alpina strains by a serial dilution method. Morphological identification was carried out using light microscopy (Olympus, Japan) and genetic diversity of the isolated Mortierella alpina strains was assessed using conserved internal transcribed spacer (ITS) gene sequences available on the NCBI GenBank database for the confirmation of novelty. The nucleotide sequences reported in this study have been deposited at GenBank (accession no. MZ298831:MZ298835). The MultAlin program was used to align the sequences of closely related strains. The DNA sequences were analyzed for phylogenetic relationships by molecular evolutionary genetic analysis using MEGA X software consisting of Clustal_X v.2.1 for multiple sequence alignment. The neighbour-joining tree was constructed using the Kimura 2-parameter substitution model. Results: The present research study confirms four oleaginous fungal isolates from Libyan soil. These isolates (barcoded as MSU-101, MSU-201, MSU-401 and MSU-501) were discovered and reported for the first time from diverse soil samples of district Aljabal Al-Akhdar in North-East Libya and fall in the class: Zygomycetes; order: Mortierellales. Conclusions: Four oleaginous fungal isolates barcoded as MSU-101, MSU-201, MSU-401 and MSU-501 were identified and confirmed by morphological and molecular analysis. These fungal isolates showed highest similarity with Mortierella alpina species and can be potentialistic single cell oil producers. Thus, the present research study provides insight to the unseen fungal diversity and contributes to more comprehensive Mortierella alpina reference collections worldwide.
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