ITS and EF1 alpha DNA Barcoding DatabasesInternational Society for Human and Animal Mycology Barcoding Database
The currently used identification methods of agents causing human mycoses have serious limitations, are time consuming and require special trained personal. However to enable an informed choice for proper anti-fungal treatment an adequate identification at the specific level is necessary. DNA barcoding using short species-specific DNA signatures is an alternative to classical fungal identification. This website offers quality controlled primary, the Internal Transcribed Spacer (ITS) regions of the ribosomal DNA gene cluster (Schoch et al. 2012, Irinyi et al. 2015), and secondary, elongation factor 1 alpha (Stielow et al. 2015), fungal DNA barcode sequences, which can be used individually or in combination for the identification of human and animal pathogenic fungi. Thanks to eleven contributing research groups from all around the world the Barcoding database currently contains more than 4000 sequences representing 640 human/animal pathogenic fungal species. The elongation factor 1 alpha database is currently under development and contains ~500 sequences of 130 human/animal pathogenic fungal species. Users are encouraged to submit their full dataset from additional strain(s), to the curators of the databases, to enable to build a comprehensive database for both fungal DNA barcode loci covering all clinically important fungal pathogens. People interested in the sequences available from this website can download the latest version here along with the taxonomy file here.