Identification of different Fusarium spp. through mVOCS profiling by means of proton-transfer-reaction time-of-flight (PTR-TOF-MS) analysis

The microbial volatile organic compounds (mVOCs) profiling of different Fusarium spp. affecting small grain cereals has been analyzed by means of Proton-Transfer-Reaction Time-of-Flight (PTR- 2 ToF-MS). Morphological and sequence analysis of the elongation factor conserved domain allow identifying unequivocally different Fusarium species. Several mVOCs, ranging from 27.022 to 205.195 m/z were revealed. Partial Least Square Discriminant Analysis (PLS-DA) on the whole mVOCs dataset was used to classify the different species of Fusarium. Results showed that PTR-ToFMS profiling of mVOCs is able to distinguish among different Fusarium spp. with percentages of correct classification of 97.8 and 92.6%, in the model/validation dataset and in the independent test set, respectively.