Abstract
Citrinin is a toxic secondary metabolite of Penicillium citrinum and its contamination in many food items has been widely reported. However, research on the citrinin biosynthesis pathway and its regulation mechanism in P. citrinum is rarely reported. In this study, we investigated the effect of different carbon sources on citrinin production by P. citrinum and used transcriptome analysis to study the underlying molecular mechanism. Our results indicated that glucose, used as the sole carbon source, could significantly promote citrinin production by P. citrinum in Czapek’s broth medium compared with sucrose. A total of 19,967 unigenes were annotated by BLAST in Nr, Nt, Swiss-Prot and Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes (KEGG) databases. Transcriptome comparison between P. citrinum cultured with sucrose and glucose revealed 1085 differentially expressed unigenes. Among them, 610 were upregulated while 475 were downregulated under glucose as compared to sucrose. KEGG pathway and Gene ontology (GO) analysis indicated that many metabolic processes (e.g., carbohydrate, secondary metabolism, fatty acid and amino acid metabolism) were affected, and potentially interesting genes that encoded putative components of signal transduction, stress response and transcription factor were identified. These genes obviously had important impacts on their regulation in citrinin biosynthesis, which provides a better understanding of the molecular mechanism of citrinin biosynthesis by P. citrinum.
Highlights
Mycotoxins are secondary fungal metabolites, and are toxic to humans and animals [1].Mycotoxins contamination in agricultural products has been of great global concern during the past several decades
We investigated the impact of different carbon sources on citrinin production by P. citrinum
Considering the importance of sugar in fruits described by Kumar et al [26], we investigated the effect of different carbon sources on citrinin production by P. citrinum and used
Summary
Mycotoxins contamination in agricultural products has been of great global concern during the past several decades. Citrinin is a mycotoxin that was originally isolated from Penicillium citrinum (P. citrinum), and was produced by several other species of Penicillium, Aspergillus, and Monascus [2,3]. P. citrinum can be found in different environments, ranging from agricultural fields, permafrost sediments to forest soils [4], which have been vigorously studied since the discovery of their capability to produce citrinin [5]. Contamination of P. citrinum and citrinin has been reported in a wide variety of agricultural commodities, food and feedstuffs [6]. Citrinin is hepatotoxic and nephrotoxic to a number of animal species and has been implicated in endemic animal and human nephropathy [9,10]
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