Date of Award

2008

Type

Thesis

Major

Biology

Department

Biology

First Advisor

Milwood Motley

Abstract

Aspergillus fumigalus is a ubiquitous fungus that causes an infection called aspergillosis in immune-compromised surgery patients (Latge, 2001, 384; Bok et al. 2006). Aspergillosis cases have increased in the past decade due to the increasing number of patients undergoing immunosuppressive therapy and receiving organ transplants (Bok et al. 2006). Although there is still disagreement as to the causative agent of the symptoms accompanying aspergillosis, many scientists suspect that the compound, gliotoxin, plays a major role, hi this study, we compared the amounts of gliotoxin produced from clinical and environmental isolates of A. fumigatus. We hypothesized that the amount of gliotoxin produced would be higher in the clinical isolates in comparison to the environmental isolates. Cell assay results showed that the clinical isolates produced more gliotoxin than the environmental isolates while the HPLC results showed no significant difference between gliotoxin production in clinical and environmental isolates.

Comments

Honors Thesis

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