Full Length Research Paper

Discrimination and numerical analysis of human pathogenic Candida albicans strains based on SDS-PAGE protein profiles

Ismet Berber¹* and Suat Ekin²

¹Department of Biology, Faculty of Arts and Science, Yüzüncü Yıl University, 65080 Van, Turkey.

²Department of Chemistry, Faculty of Arts and Science, Yüzüncü Yıl University, 65080 Van, Turkey.

*Corresponding author. E-mail: ismetberber@yahoo.com.

Accepted 18 January, 2008

In the present study, 21 Candida albicans strains were investigated using the commercial kit API 20C AUX system and the numerical analysis of whole-cell protein profiles. The results of the commercial kit confirmed that the all the strains belonged to C. albicans species. However, the research indicated that SDS-PAGE of polypeptides of whole-cell extracts can provide more valuable taxonomic information than conventional yeast test kits at the subspecies level. Despite the fact that C. albicans subtypes isolated from different anatomical sites had similar protein profiles, there were some distinctive protein bands. Numerical analysis of whole-cell protein profiles of all strains revealed 2 major clusters at similarity degrees of between 46.26 and 100%. Moreover, the results of numerical analysis confirmed that each cluster had characteristic and distinctive protein profiles. The research showed that, the morphological examination of yeast isolates remains essential to obtaining a correct identification, both the commercial yeast kit system and the numerical analysis of whole-cell protein patterns can be useful for the more reliable identification of C. albicans strains.

Key words: Candida albicans, numerical analysis, SDS-PAGE and whole-cell protein patterns.