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Introduction to Clinical Mycology

Part One



Fungi: Morphology of Molds

Slide 22

November 2011

So just to give you an idea of some of the terms, some more language if you will, to learn, we have terms that we use to help us describe what we see under the microscope to make it a little easier for others to understand. If you look at a mold on a culture plate, you will see a colony there, a fluffy colony. In our laboratory, we call them fuzzies. If you look underneath a microscope, you will find they are made up of these hyphae. These are filaments that have parallel walls; they look like small garden hoses. The collective name for the colony is mycelium and I don’t think many people use the term mycelium anymore but it is there for you to see. The hyphae, these garden hose type structures, may be divided up into compartments by some structures called septae. And so we talk about septate hyphae and we talk about nonseptate hyphae which don’t have any of these division, these compartments in them and sometimes we just refer to nonseptate hyphae as pauci-septate because certainly, these fungi that are thought to be nonseptate have a few of these septations and I will show you shortly here. Spores. Most of the fungi that we deal with produce spores that are called Conidia. They are produced on specialized structures whether it is a short or a long stalk or a really elaborate structure called a Conidia form. Some of the spores are small. Some of them are large. So we define them by being macro Conidia or micro Conidia. Sometimes these spores on a hyphae may be pigmented or they may not be and that leads us to different groups.

Fungi: Morphology of Molds
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