The following six-step protocol discriminated nine of the 11 species Aspergillus species of the section Flavi– five of the economically important and widespread species and four recently described species. The primer set targeting the aflT gene designed by Tominaga et al. (2006) successfully amplified 11 type strains of Aspergillus section Flavi, but none of the other species and genera were tested. Afaflt-F and Afaflt-R separated the 11 species into two groups. Species of the first group (A. flavus/A. oryzae/A. minisclerotigenes/A. parvisclerotigenus) presented the amplified Epigenetic Reader Domain inhibitor target fragment, whereas no amplification was observed for species of the second group (A.

parasiticus/A. sojae/A. nomius/A. tamarii/A. arachidicola/A. bombycis/A. pseudotamarii). Within the second group, the AflR-F and AflR-R primers amplified the target products only for A. parasiticus, A. sojae and A. arachidicola, and not for A. nomius, A. tamarii, A. bombycis and A. pseudotamarii, confirming the data of Chang et al. (1995). For the nonamplified species during the third step, the Anits-F

and Anits-R primers amplified only A. nomius, as expected. For the species group obtained in the second step (A. flavus/A. oryzae/A. minisclerotigenes/A. parvisclerotigenus), the presence of a 3.8-kb band in the A. flavus SmaI restriction pattern only and of 2.7-kb and 1-kb bands Inhibitor Library high throughput in the A. oryzae restriction pattern differentiated A. flavus from A. oryzae (Fig. 2a), as previously demonstrated by Klich & Mullaney (1987). Furthermore, the SmaI pattern of A. minisclerotigenes did not present a 3.8-kb band (Fig. 2b). Unfortunately, A. parvisclerotigenus could not be differentiated from A. flavus after the SmaI digest (Fig. 2b). This step consists in analyzing RAPD profiles of the unresolved groups A. parasiticus/A. ADP ribosylation factor sojae/A. arachidicola and A.

tamarii/A. bombycis/A. pseudotamarii. The presence of a major 2.0-kb band in the A. parasiticus amplification pattern obtained with OPB-10 allowed us to distinguish A. parasiticus from A. sojae (Fig. 3a), as demonstrated previously by Yuan et al. (1995). Furthermore, using the OPA-04 primer, a major band of 1.7 kb was observed in the pattern of A. arachidicola and not in the two other patterns (Fig. 3a). The two RAPD amplifications thus allowed the discrimination of the three species. RAPD patterns of A. bombycis obtained with OPA-04, OPB-10 and OPR-01 were clearly different from those of A. tamarii and A. pseudotamarii (Fig. 3b). The A. pseudotamarii amplification pattern obtained with OPR-01 produces a 3000-bp and a 500-bp major band, allowing its discrimination from A. tamarii. The PCR profiles (+ or −) obtained for the four primer sets are summarized in Table 1, as well as the RAPD and SmaI digestion results. Finally, a decision-making tree (Fig. 4) was set up and will serve as the molecular key tool for Aspergillus section Flavi strain identification.