Lectinas : caracterização quimiotaxinomica de microalgas de água doce

Abstract

Freshwater green microalgae are a group which present great complexity for classical morphological taxonomy. For groups like Selenastraceae family, the morphological characteristics are ambiguous at genus level and do not reflect the phylogenetic relationships. Taxonomic polyphasic approaches have been emerged to assist the classical taxonomy in the classification of such groups. Taking into account the specific relation lectin-carbohydrate and the great diversity in monomer composition of extracellular polysaccharides from microalgae, we aim to understand if some microalgae taxa have specific terminal monosaccharides set, which could be used as chemotaxonomic feature within a polyphasic taxonomic approach. Thus, we performed an optimization of methods so far used in taxonomy, and analyzed the terminal monosaccharides and lectins behavior against ten species from different genera to the following families: Selenastraceae and Scenedesmaceae (Chlorophyceae), Botryococcaceae and Oocystaceae (Trebouphyceae), and Fragilariaceae, Stephanodiscaceae (Bacillariphyceae), all of them in crops. We noticed that is possible, using this technique, to separate strains from the same species isolated different from places. Furthermore, we found some indicator monosaccharides the microalgae of some taxa. In this work we use six types of lectins and eleven anti synthetic lectins to recognize the terminal monosaccharides and lectins.