ABSTRACT
Previously, taxonomic identification of fungi was based on the observations of morphological traits, such as cultural morphologies, including colony and color characteristics on specific culture media, its size and shape, development of sexual, asexual spores, spore-forming structures and physiological characteristics such as the ability to utilize various compounds as source of nitrogen and carbon (Felsenstein, 1985). These methods tend to be time consuming, laborious and may take several days for isolation. Moreover, fungal species differ in their carbon utilization and cannot be cultured on a given medium, which leads inaccurate analysis of the species that may not belong to the true fungal community (Wu et al., 2003). The uncultured and non-viable spores can possibly be allergenic and cause health issues. For instance, the conidia of
Stachybotrys chartarum rapidly lose viability when it comes in contact with air, without losing its toxigenicity (Hibbett et al., 2007). Thus, rapid detection of fungi in a given environment is essential for monitoring the exposure risk and for developing precautionary measures for public health safety (Zeng et al., 2003). Biochemical markers has been assumed reliable and is tried out extensively, but no encouraging results are obtained, as they are often sex limited, age-dependent and are significantly influenced by the environment (Alim et al., 2011). Sometimes, the various genotypic classes are indistinguishable at the phenotypic level owing to dominance effect. Moreover, these markers show variability in their coding sequences that constitute less than 10 per cent of the total genome (Zwickl, 2006).
