Molecular Identification of Aspergillus spp. isolated from different vegetables in markets of Dohuk city/Iraq

Vegetables are important preventive foods and are useful for maintaining health and preventing diseases and some fungi, such as Penicillium spp., Aspergillus spp. and Fusarium spp. grown on vegetables and contaminated it. Therefore, the aim of the study was to isolation and identification of fungi contaminating different types of vegetables infected with rot collected from local markets of Duhok city/Iraq, and Molecular identification of Aspergillus nidulans using Polymerase Chain Reactions (PCR), by Design of the primer, Extraction of DNA, Nucleotide sequencing of amplified pieces using DNA sequencing which was done at Psomagene sequencing company (Maryland/ USA) and The phylogenetic tree was constructed by bootstrap (100X) analysis using the MEGA-11 software. Results referred to all vegetable samples under study contaminated with different genera of fungi, green bell pepper contaminated with Rhizopus stolonifer in (43.2%), Aspergillus nidulans was isolated from red bell pepper in (19.2%), while it was the most frequent isolates from eggplant, pumpkin, cucumber and cauliflower in percentage of 43.3%, 46.8%, 31.5% and 58.9% respectively. According to morphological and microscopic identification A. nidulans was chosen for molecular study because of its high frequency in most vegetable samples. Molecular identification of A. nidulans using 18 S rRNA, a pair of specialized primers (ITS1) and (ITS2) was adopted. In electrophoresis on agarose gel at a concentration of 2%, the results showed a package size of 600 bp. belonging to Aspergillus nidulans, and identical results were obtained for the isolate with the standard isolates installed in the Basic Local Alignment Search Tool (BLAST) program database. The evolutionary relationship was found between the local isolate in this study and the one registered in NCBI under the name Aspergillus nidulans HAA78. The isolate Aspergillus nidulans HAA78 was 100% identical to the isolate Aspergillus nidulans strain ATCC (10074). It was concluded that all vegetables isolated from ...