Item

Banana infecting fungus, Fusarium musae, is also an opportunistic human pathogen: are bananas potential carriers and source of fusariosis?

Stubbe, Dirk
Piérard, Denis
Detandt, Monique
Hendrickx, Marijke
Citations
Altmetric:
Abstract

During re-identification of Fusarium strains in the BCCM™/IHEM fungal collection by multilocus sequence-analysis we observed that five strains, previously identified as Fusarium verticillioides, were Fusarium musae, a species described in 2011 from banana fruits. Four strains were isolated from blood samples or biopsies of immune-suppressed patients and one was isolated from the clinical environment, all originating from different hospitals in Belgium or France, 2001-2008. The F. musae identity of our isolates was confirmed by phylogenetic analysis using reference sequences of type material. Absence of the gene cluster necessary for fumonisin biosynthesis, characteristic to F. musae, was also the case for our isolates. In vitro antifungal susceptibility testing revealed no important differences in their susceptibility compared to clinical F. verticillioides strains and terbinafine was the most effective drug. Additional clinical F. musae strains were searched by performing BLAST queries in GenBank. Eight strains were found, of which six were keratitis cases from the U.S. multistate contact lens-associated outbreak in 2005 and 2006. The two other strains were also from the U.S., causing either a skin infection or sinusitis. This report is the first to describe F. musae as causative agent of superficial and opportunistic, disseminated infections in humans. Imported bananas might act as carriers of F. musae spores and be a potential source of infection with F. musae in humans. An alternative hypothesis is that the natural distribution of F. musae is geographically a lot broader than originally suspected and F. musae is present on different plant hosts.

Description
Date
2014-12-31
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Chapter title
Publication type
Peer reviewed scientific article
Research Projects
Organizational Units
Journal Issue
Keywords
Disease Reservoirs, Fusariosis, Fusarium, Humans, Molecular Sequence Data, Musa, Phylogeny, Plant Diseases, United States
Citation
Topic(s)
Related project
Embedded videos