Environmental and food spoilage fungi cause billions of dollars in damage in North America alone each year, in the form of rotted wood and crops, spoiled food, and human and animal illness. Each of these threats could be drastically reduced if early and more rapid detection processes are developed to replace the serological methods that are currently in practice. The current North American protocol for establishing identification of contaminating fungi both in environment and food have a time frame of approximately one week to twenty-two days. The use of a Fourier transform infrared (FTIR) spectrometer, coupled with a focal-plan-array (FPA) detector, can theoretically shorten the time (analysis within minutes after obtaining a pure culture) it takes to identify and classify a fungal cell. FPA-FTIR spectroscopy is advantageous as little to no sample preparation is required and results are obtained in less than one minute per sample. The fungal subset chosen for this study includes representatives from five phyla, including Zygomycota (Mucor heimalis), Ascomycota (Neurospora crassa, Ophiostoma minor, Chaetomium globosporum, Alternaria brassicicola), Basidiomycota (Schizophyllum commune, Chaetomium globosporum), Deutromycota (Aspergillus niger, Penicillium notatum, Aureobasidium pullulans) and the Mycetozoa (dictyostelium discoideum, physarum polycephalum). Different variables were tested and evaluated, including variability in growth parameters, wet deposition of fungi versus dry smearing of fungi, optimal absorbance range, and spectral processing parameters as well as discrepancies from one instrument to another, as well as spectral reproducibility from one instrument to another. By following the experimental protocol developed, reproducible spectra were attained, and differentiation of the fungi within the set selected for this study was achieved. The results of this work demonstrate that FPA-FTIR spectroscopy can potentially be employed for the accurate identification of environmental and food spoilage fungi.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:QMM.111946 |
| Date | January 2008 |
| Creators | Pinchuk, Orley R. (Orley Rachel), 1980- |
| Publisher | McGill University |
| Source Sets | Library and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Coverage | Master of Science (Department of Food Science and Agricultural Chemistry.) |
| Rights | All items in eScholarship@McGill are protected by copyright with all rights reserved unless otherwise indicated. |
| Relation | alephsysno: 002837739, proquestno: AAIMR67016, Theses scanned by UMI/ProQuest. |
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