Journal of Microbiology

Review

REVIEW] Candida albicans, a Major Human Fungal Pathogen: Joon Kim , Peter Sudbery; J. Microbiol. 2011;49(2):171-177. Published online May 3, 2011; DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12275-011-1064-7

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Abstract: Candida albicans is the most common human fungal pathogen (Beck-Sague and Jarvis, 1993). It is normally a harmless commensal organism. However, it is a opportunistic pathogen for some immunologically weak and immunocompromised people. It is responsible for painful mucosal infections such as the vaginitis in women and oral-pharangeal thrush in AIDS patients. In certain groups of vulnerable patients it causes severe, life-threatening bloodstream infections and it causes severe, life-threatening bloodstream infections and subsequent infections in the internal organs. There are various fascinating features of the C. albicans life cycle and biology that have made the pathogen the subject of extensive research, including its ability to grow in unicellular yeast, psudohyphal, and hyphal forms (Fig. 1A); its ability to switch between different but stable phenotypic states, and the way that it retains the ability to mate but apparently loses the ability to go through meiosis to complete the sexual cycle. This research has been greatly facilitated by the derivation of the complete C. albicans genome sequence (Braun et al., 2005), the development of a variety of molecular tools for gene manipulation, and a store of underpinning knowledge of cell biology borrowed from the distantly related model yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae (Berman and Sudbery, 2002; Noble and Johnson, 2007). This review will provide a brief overview of the importance of C. albicans as a public health issue, the experimental tools developed to study its fascinating biology, and some examples of how these have been applied.

Journal Article

Molecular Epidemiological Analysis of Bloodstream Isolates of Candida albicans from a University Hospital over a Five-Year Period: Jong Hee Shin , Yu Gyung Og , Duck Cho , Seung Jung Kee , Myung Geun Shin , Soon Pal Suh , Dong Wook Ryang; J. Microbiol. 2005;43(6):546-554.; DOI: https://doi.org/2291 [pii]

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Abstract: We assessed the genetic relations and epidemiological links among bloodstream isolates of Candida albicans, which were obtained from a university hospital over a period of five years. The 54 bloodstream isolates from the 38 patients yielded 14 different karyotypes, 29 different patterns after digestion with SfiI (REAG-S), and 31 different patterns after digestion with BssHII (REAG-B) when analyzed using three different pulsed-field gel electrophoresis (PFGE) typing methods. In 11 patients with serial bloodstream isolates, all strains from each patient had the same PFGE pattern. The dendrograms for all of the strains revealed that the distribution of similarity values ranged from 0.70 to 1.0 in the REAG-S patterns, and from 0.35 to 1.0 in the REAG-B patterns. Overall, the combination of the three different PFGE methods identified 31 distinct types, reflecting the results obtained using the REAG-B alone different. different Five PFGE types were shared among 22 isolates from 12 patients. These types of strains were more frequently associated with central venous catheter-related fungemia than the other 26 type strains (92% versus 31%; P < 0.005). Of five PFGE types, four isolates were determined to be epidemiologically related: each of these types was primarily from two or three patients who had been hospitalized concurrently within the same intensive care unit. Our results suggest that the REAG-B constitutes perhaps the most useful PFGE method for investigating C. albicans candidemia and also shows that a relatively high proportion of C. albicans candidemia may be associated with exogenous acquisition of clonal strains.

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