THE USE OF PRINCIPAL COMPONENT ANALYSIS (PCA) FOR PATTERN-RECOGNITIONIN EUCALYPTUS-GRANDIS WOOD BIODEGRADATION EXPERIMENTS

Eucalyptus grandis wood was biodegraded by eight basidiomycetes and tw o ascomycetes. Four groups of decayed wood samples were recognized bas ed on the principal component analysis (PCA) of weight and component l oss data. Among the 10 fungal species studied, no selective lignin bio degradation was achieved. PCA was very efficient in recognizing wood d ecay patterns and seems to be a useful tool to analyse large group of weight- and component-loss data.