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Introduction to Clinical Mycology

Part 2



Media for Recovery of Fungi from Clinical Specimens

Slide 30

January 2012

In terms of trying to make a definitive diagnosis of an organism, first you have to be able to culture and grow it up before you can make an identification. Then you are faced with which media do you use for trying to grow these organisms. There are a number of media available that have been around for many years, a few new ones. Brain heart infusion agar has been around for a long time, works fine for recovery of fungi. Sabouraud's dextrose agar is one that has been written about in text books for many, many years and is probably the worst medium for growing fungi that we have. It is a good subculture medium but is a poor primary recovery medium. Inhibitory mold agar is an agar that is very useful for the recovery and it does not inhibit molds like it sounds like it might. It has chloramphenicol in it that inhibits bacteria and allows the molds to grow. Sabhi agar is a combination of Sabouraud's and Brain heart infusion agar works well. Mycosel is Sabouraud's agar that contains chloramphenicol and a compound called cycloheximide. Works fine for recovering dermatophytes primarily, but not much of anything else. Potato flakes agar is developed in recent years at the University of Texas in San Antonio works fine for primary recovery. Yeast extract phosphate agar will be shown as an example a little later on how to recover some of the organisms from contaminated clinical specimens.

Recovery of Fungi from Clinical Specimens
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