SCAN: Fungal commmunities on cork

Abstract

Cork is a natural, renewable and biodegradable material used for many centuries as a wine closure.
The manufacturing of cork stoppers involves a boiling operation followed by a rest stage of 3 – 4 days aiming cork planks flattening and a humidity decrease to the necessary level to allow cork cutting. In that phase the fungi that normally colonized the cork in the cork oak tree and survived the boiling treatment, together with the fungi present in the factory environment completely covers the cork slabs. To study the shift in the cultivable fungal community during several manufacturing stages of cork discs a sampling scheme was planned through the key stages of the process. Fungi were isolated and almost of them identified until species level using phenotypic and molecular methods (work performed in collaboration with the Fungal Biodiversity Centre in Netherlands-CBS). The results showed a predominance of Penicillium genus followed by Aspergillus, Chrysonilia, Mucor and Trichoderma genera. Penicillium glabrum was the predominant isolated species, present in all the sampling stages. A new Penicillium species was identified and described.
To address the quality of the final product and better characterise the fungal isolates, the extrolites produced by the fungal species that survived the boiling stage were analysed through GC-MS and HPLC using both diode array and fluorescence detectors. The results show that cork medium is not a suitable media for the secondary metabolites production, although some fungi produced some extrolites.

Short CV
1990 – 1996 Degree in Biology – Microbiology and Genetics by Faculdade de Ciências da Universidade de Lisboa.
1997 – 1999 - Research student in the Discomycetes of Portugal, under the supervision of Prof. J. L. Baptista Ferreira.
2003 – 2004 - Research student in the Identification of fungi isolated from cork, under the supervision of Doutora Vitória San Romão.
Since November 2004 - PhD student in the Physiology of Environmentally Conditioned Microbiota group at ITQB, under the supervision of Doutora Vitória San Romão and Doutora Teresa Crespo. Research area: Study of the total fungal population present in cork along the manufacturing process.