Introduction & Objective: Candida species can cause opportunistic infections in human. Although Candida albicans is major pathogenic species, non-albicans species of Candida such as C. glabrata , C. tropicalis and C. krusei have been increasingly reported. Identification of Candida species is essential for effective antifungal therapy and for infection control purposes. In the present study the commercial medium CHROMagar Candida was used as a differential method for identification of the yeasts isolated from patients.

Materials & Methods: Sixteen standard strains of Candida and non?Candida yeasts were used as the reference cultures. 280 yeasts isolated from the patients referred to two Medical Mycology Laboratories in Tehran were cultured on the chromogenic medium CHROMagar Candida. The cultures incubated for 48 h at 35ºC and were differentiated based on the color of colonies in comparison with the standard strains. For colonies with unspecific color, a PCR-RFLP method was performed.

Results: The most frequent species were Candida albicans(66.5%) followed by C. parapsilosis (8.6%), C. tropicalis (8.2%), C. glabrata (6.1%), C. krusei (4.6%), C. kefyr (2.5%), C. guilliermondii (0.7%), C. lusitania (0.35%) and Cryptococcus neoformans (0.35%).

Conclusion: CHROMagar Candida can be a simple and straight-forward method for specific differentiation of medically important Candida species includingC. albicans, C. krusei, C. tropicalis and C. glabrata, but not for all Candidaisolates. More phenotypic or genotypic methods are necessary for exact identification of other Candida species.