Human Epithelial Cells Discriminate between Commensal and Pathogenic Interactions with Candida albicans.

The commensal fungus, Candida albicans, can cause life-threatening infections in at risk individuals. C. albicans colonizes mucosal surfaces of most people, adhering to and interacting with epithelial cells. At low concentrations, C. albicans is not pathogenic nor does it cause epithelial cell damage in vitro; at high concentrations, C. albicans causes mucosal infections and kills epithelial cells in vitro. Here we show that while there are quantitative dose-dependent differences in exposed epithelial cell populations, these reflect a fundamental qualitative difference in host cell response to C. albicans. Using transcriptional profiling experiments and real time PCR, we found that wild-type C. albicans induce dose-dependent responses from a FaDu epithelial cell line. However, real time PCR and Western blot analysis using a high dose of various C. albicans strains demonstrated that these dose-dependent responses are associated with ability to promote host cell damage. Our studies support the idea that epithelial cells play a key role in the immune system by monitoring the microbial community at mucosal surfaces and initiating defensive responses when this community is dysfunctional. This places epithelial cells at a pivotal position in the interaction with C. albicans as epithelial cells themselves promote C. albicans stimulated damage.

Evolution in an ancient detoxification pathway is coupled with a transition to herbivory in the drosophilidae.

Chemically defended plant tissues present formidable barriers to herbivores. Although mechanisms to resist plant defenses have been identified in ancient herbivorous lineages, adaptations to overcome plant defenses during transitions to herbivory remain relatively unexplored. The fly genus Scaptomyza is nested within the genus Drosophila and includes species that feed on the living tissue of mustard plants (Brassicaceae), yet this lineage is derived from microbe-feeding ancestors. We found that mustard-feeding Scaptomyza species and microbe-feeding Drosophila melanogaster detoxify mustard oils, the primary chemical defenses in the Brassicaceae, using the widely conserved mercapturic acid pathway. This detoxification strategy differs from other specialist herbivores of mustard plants, which possess derived mechanisms to obviate mustard oil formation. To investigate whether mustard feeding is coupled with evolution in the mercapturic acid pathway, we profiled functional and molecular evolutionary changes in the enzyme glutathione S-transferase D1 (GSTD1), which catalyzes the first step of the mercapturic acid pathway and is induced by mustard defense products in Scaptomyza. GSTD1 acquired elevated activity against mustard oils in one mustard-feeding Scaptomyza species in which GstD1 was duplicated. Structural analysis and mutagenesis revealed that substitutions at conserved residues within and near the substrate-binding cleft account for most of this increase in activity against mustard oils. Functional evolution of GSTD1 was coupled with signatures of episodic positive selection in GstD1 after the evolution of herbivory. Overall, we found that preexisting functions of generalized detoxification systems, and their refinement by natural selection, could play a central role in the evolution of herbivory.

Assembly of the Candida albicans genome into sixteen supercontigs aligned on the eight chromosomes.

BACKGROUND: The 10.9x genomic sequence of Candida albicans, the most important human fungal pathogen, was published in 2004. Assembly 19 consisted of 412 supercontigs, of which 266 were a haploid set, since this fungus is diploid and contains an extensive degree of heterozygosity but lacks a complete sexual cycle. However, sequences of specific chromosomes were not determined. RESULTS: Supercontigs from Assembly 19 (183, representing 98.4% of the sequence) were assigned to individual chromosomes purified by pulse-field gel electrophoresis and hybridized to DNA microarrays. Nine Assembly 19 supercontigs were found to contain markers from two different chromosomes. Assembly 21 contains the sequence of each of the eight chromosomes and was determined using a synteny analysis with preliminary versions of the Candida dubliniensis genome assembly, bioinformatics, a sequence tagged site (STS) map of overlapping fosmid clones, and an optical map. The orientation and order of the contigs on each chromosome, repeat regions too large to be covered by a sequence run, such as the ribosomal DNA cluster and the major repeat sequence, and telomere placement were determined using the STS map. Sequence gaps were closed by PCR and sequencing of the products. The overall assembly was compared to an optical map; this identified some misassembled contigs and gave a size estimate for each chromosome. CONCLUSION: Assembly 21 reveals an ancient chromosome fusion, a number of small internal duplications followed by inversions, and a subtelomeric arrangement, including a new gene family, the TLO genes. Correlations of position with relatedness of gene families imply a novel method of dispersion. The sequence of the individual chromosomes of C. albicans raises interesting biological questions about gene family creation and dispersion, subtelomere organization, and chromosome evolution.