Alternative energy in the fungal cell
Yeast fungi can cause deadly infections even without filamentation
Until now, almost all studies suggested that the formation of hyphae is one of the most important virulence factors of the yeast Candida albicans. Ilse Jacobsen, Project leader of FungiNet Project C5 at Leibniz-HKI and her team in in Jena – in close collaboration with the group of Thomas Dandekar within FungiNet Project B2 at Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg– have now shown for the first time that a mutant form of the fungus that does not form hyphae can also cause lethal systemic infections. The researchers report their findings in Nature Communications.
Original publication
Dunker C, Polke M, Schulze-Richter B, Schubert K, Rudolphi S, Gressler AE, Pawlik T, Prada Salcedo JP, Niemiec MJ, Slesiona-Künzel S, Swidergall M, Martin R, Dandekar T, Jacobsen ID (2021) Rapid proliferation due to better metabolic adaptation results in full virulence of a filament-deficient Candida albicans strain. Nat Commun 12: 3899.