Protein Profiling of Aspergillus terreus in Response to Chromium Stress

Hexavalent chromium is highly toxic to living organisms. In order to study the role of chromium toxicity towards growth and protein profile of Aspergillus terreus, the fungi were exposed to varying concentrations (50 to 250 mg/l) of Potassium di chromate for a period of 14 days. Present study has demonstrated that the exposure of hexavalent chromium to A. terreus resulted in decrease in growth. Protein was extracted from the biomass and the amount of total protein showed 0.02mg/ml decrease with the increase of every 50 mg/l chromium concentration. The total protein was separated and identified using SDS PAGE where 14.3 kDa and 3.9 kDa protein was constantly present in all the concentration of chromium and 6.5 kDa protein can be considered as stress protein as it appear only at higher (200 mg/l and 250 mg/l) chromium concentration.