33rd USIAS Fellows seminar: The battle against fungal epidemics - engineered yeast
By Fabrice Jossinet, USIAS Fellow 2015
The incidence of fungal infections has increased significantly over the last decades, leading to high rates of morbidity and mortality. A recent study evaluated that billions of people are infected by fungi every year, killing as many people as malaria or tuberculosis.
Until recently, the fungus C. glabrata was thought to be a primarily non-pathogenic organism. However, with the increase of nosocomial (hospital-acquired) diseases, long-term hospitalizations and the growing population of immunocompromised patients (including the elderly), C. glabrata has turned out to be a highly opportunistic pathogen.
The outbreak of C. glabrata has major implications in healthcare worldwide, and there is an urgent need to understand its pathogenicity and increasing resistance to anti-fungal compounds. However, the shortage of information concerning its genome composition and the lack of convenient animal models are two factors impeding a better understanding.
During his USIAS Fellowship, Fabrice Jossinet together with post-doc Ludovik Enkler is constructing a recombinant strain of C. glabrata whichallows to target the genomic loci characterized experimentally and the molecular families highlighted bioinformatically in order to test their role in the pathogenicity process.
It is the first project aiming at describing, at the transcriptional level, the regulation of genes and non-coding RNA during pathogenesis and resistance. It is expected to lead to new routes to identify potential new targets of anti-fungal molecules, which would have a major benefits for health care.
