Cassiae Semen (CS) has been widely used as roasted tea and traditional Chinese medicine for decades. However, CS is easily contaminated by fungi and mycotoxins during pre-harvest and post-harvest process, thus posing a potential threat to consumer health. In this study, we used the Illumina MiSeq PE300 platform and targeted the internal transcribed spacer 2 sequences to survey the occurrence of fungi in raw and roasted CS samples. Results showed the fungal contamination in all 12 test samples. Ascomycota was the prevailing fungus at the phylum level, with the relative abundance of 66.50%-99.42%. At the genus level, Aspergillus, Cladosporium, and Penicillium were the most dominant genera, accounting for 0.66%-85.51%, 0.20%-29.11%, and 0.11%-32.92% of the fungal reads, respectively. A total of 68 species were identified, among which six potential toxigenic fungi belonging to Aspergillus, Penicillium, Candida, and Schizophyllum genera were detected. Moreover, differences in fungal communities were observed in raw and roasted CS samples. In conclusion, amplicon sequencing is feasible for analyzing fungal communities in CS samples, which provides a new approach to investigate the fungal contamination in edible-medicinal herb, thereby ensuring food safety and drug efficacy.

中文翻译：

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使用高通量测序表征药用和食用决明子精子中的真菌群落。

决明子（CS）已被广泛用作烤茶和中药数十年。但是，在收获前和收获后的过程中，CS容易被真菌和霉菌毒素污染，从而对消费者的健康构成潜在威胁。在这项研究中，我们使用了Illumina MiSeq PE300平台，并针对内部转录的间隔子2序列，以调查原始和烤制CS样品中真菌的发生情况。结果显示所有12个测试样品中的真菌污染。子囊菌是门类中的主要真菌，相对丰度为66.50％-99.42％。在属水平上，曲霉属，枝孢属和青霉属是最主要的属，分别占真菌读数的0.66％-85.51％，0.20％-29.11％和0.11％-32.92％。总共鉴定出68种，其中检出了6种潜在的产毒真菌，分别属于曲霉属，青霉属，念珠菌属和裂褶菌属。此外，在生的和烤的CS样品中观察到真菌群落的差异。综上所述，扩增子测序技术可用于分析CS样品中的真菌群落，为研究食用草药中的真菌污染提供了一种新方法，从而确保了食品安全性和药物有效性。