Isolation of Fungal Nucleic Acids

The last 10 years have witnessed a growing interest in fungal molecular biology and, in a number of systems, both DNA and RNA technologies have been applied to address various aspects of fungal biology. Consequently, considerable progress has been made in the use of molecular markers, i.e., restriction fragment length polymorphisms (1 ), fingerprints (2 ), polymerase chain reaction (PCR) amplification profiles (3 ), amplified fragment length polymorphisms (4 ), and sequence data (5 ) for fungal systematics, phy-logeny, ecology, epidemiology and population dynamics (6 ,7 ). This has led to downstream applications such as the use of probes and primers for diagnosis of pathogenic and symbiotic fungi. Moreover, from a number of fungi, genes regulating development and differentiation processes have been isolated and are being characterized (8 ,9 ). Transformation—the ability to introduce the DNA of interest into a cell—has also been achieved with a number of fungi (10 ). These developments have opened up the possibility of genetic manipulations in fungi of agricultural and biotechnological importance.