First, the melanin
produced is all derived from a chemically defined exogenous
substrate added to the fungal culture thus providing the
opportunity for metabolic labeling to gain insight into the structure
and biochemistry of the pigment. For example, metabolic labeling
with 13C-DOPA has been used in combination with solid state
NMR to show that C. neoformans DOPA-melanin is covalently
linked to aliphatic compounds [8,9].