Clinical laboratories are often challenged with mold identification. In contrast with bacterial or Candida species, which are identified on the basis of biochemical properties, mold identification is largely based on phenotypic criteria. Related species or phenotypic variants may be misidentified and rare species may remain unidentified. As a result, molecular methods have been developed to overcome these problems, and comparative sequence analysis is now considered the gold standard identification technique [4, 5].
The internal transcribed spacer (ITS) region is the most commonly used target for sequencing in clinical laboratories because of the following benefits: (i) multiple copies of the ribosomal gene are present in all organisms, enabling sensitive detection by PCR, and (ii) the ITS region contains both highly conserved and variable regions, and is therefore, the optimal target for developing specific PCR primers that discriminate among closely related species [6-9]. However, the ITS region might not provide species-level resolution for all species. In such cases, other targets such as the D1/D2 region of the 28S subunit, the ß-tubulin gene, or the translation elongation factor gene may prove useful, depending on the genus in question. In this study, we used molecular methods for mold identification and compared the performances of the ITS region, the D1/D2 region, and the ß-tubulin gene as amplification targets for comparative sequence analysis