MEASUREMENT OF THE FUNGAL DETERIORATING POTENTIAL IN THE DUST OF INDOOR ENVIRONMENTS

Several methods that can help in defining either theamount of biological contaminants present in the air orthe species diver sity of the microbial communitiesinhabiting the dust are available. Unfor tunately, none ofthese methods provides infor mation on the metabolicpotential of the microrganisms, and therefore they areoften useless in terms of forecasting the potential dangerousness.An enzymatic method developed for theevaluation of the risk to stored librar y materials in associationwith the metabolic diver sity of the fungal communityinhabiting dust deposits is applied and discussedhere. The procedure consists in the direct inoculation ofdust samples into commercial micro-titre plates andinvolves colour formation by reduction of a tetrazoliumdye to assess utilization of 95 separate sole carbonsources during a 4–10 days incubation period. T he protocolutilized in this study was specifically developed toanalyse and compare the metabolic diver sity of fungalcommunities present in the dust of different conser vativesituations in an Italian public librar y. The samplesof settled dust, each cor responding to a different conservative situation, were successfully discriminatedbased on the metabolic potential of the fungal communitiesinhabiting the shelves where samples were collected.