A newly identified gene may hold the key to preventing the fungal infection Candidiasis, which often affects intensive care unit (ICU) patients, cancer patients and patients receiving immunosuppressive therapy. A gene called CSA6 has been identified in Candida albicans, a fungal species notorious for causing high rates of morbidity and mortality in certain immunocompromised conditions such as AIDS or during cancer treatment. Fungal species residing in the mucosal linings of the gastrointestinal and urogenital tracts of healthy individuals turn into pathogens under immunocompromised conditions that disrupt the host’s defenses and cause superficial and life-threatening systemic infections.
In a recent collaborative study between Professor Kaustuva Sanyal’s group at the Jawaharlal Nehru Center for Advanced Scientific Research (JNCASR), Bangalore, India, and Christophe d’Enfert’s group at the Institut Pasteur, Paris, France (Jaitly et al, 2022), the authors performed a large-scale screen for identification of regulators of chromosome stability in C. albicans, a clinically relevant fungal model system.
Authors from JNCASR, an autonomous institute of the Institute of Science and Technology (DST), individually investigated the effect of overexpression of more than a thousand C. albicans genes on genome stability and were successful in identifying a set of six chromosome stability (CSA) genes that are important for maintaining genome integrity . While the five CSA genes identified in the study are known to be important for cell division in other species, the sixth CSA gene, named CSA6, encodes a protein that is essential for viability in C. albicans. They found that Csa6 is a critical regulator of cell cycle progression, where both overexpression and deletion of Csa6 lead to reduced growth of C. albicans cells.
The study, published in the journal Nature Communications, represents the first ever report of such a large-scale screening of the human fungal pathogen C. albicans. It identifies and elucidates the functions of a novel regulator of chromosome stability that is exclusively present in a group of medically important human fungal pathogens. In addition, it also provides a systematic scheme for identifying genes whose products may serve as potential therapeutic interventions for fungal infections by having less adverse effects in humans. Thus, small-molecule modulators that alter the expression levels of a gene called Csa6 offer potential treatment options without side effects in humans.
