Back

Fungal pathogens exposed - genomic and phenotypic insights into Candida auris and its relatives of the Candida haemulonii species complex

de Jong, A. W.; Boden, S.; Zandijk, A.; Kortsinoglou, A.; Gerrits van den Ende, B.; Francisco, E.; Podimata, K. N.; Kouvelis, V. N.; Zhou, M.; Hagen, F.

2024-05-17 microbiology
10.1101/2024.05.16.594571 bioRxiv
Show abstract

Candida auris showed the world the ability of fungi to rapidly emerge as an urgent threat to public health. Close relatives of the Candida haemulonii complex exhibit also a similar multi-drug resistant nature and are increasingly reported as nosocomial pathogens. Here, we analyze both complete genomes assemblies and extensive phenotypic data for the five C. auris clades and pathogenic and non-pathogenic species related to the C. haemulonii species complex. First, we resolved the phylogeny of the species complex. Next, comparing C. auris to its pathogenic and non-pathogenic relatives we identified a pathogenic potential for the whole C. haemulonii species complex by shared gene content and phenotypic traits linked to drug resistance and virulence. In vivo virulence assays using the Galleria mellonella fungal infection model show that C. auris strains are significantly more virulent than any of the sibling species in the C. haemulonii complex. Phenotypic analysis links the increased virulence of C. auris to a more stress resistant phenotype compared to its siblings.

Matching journals

The top 8 journals account for 50% of the predicted probability mass.

50% of probability mass above

"Similar papers" are the closest papers from that journal in the model's embedding space. They show what the match is built on, but the ranking comes mostly from a classifier over the whole training set, not from these examples alone.