BioProject

The interaction between fungal pathogen and host during infection is a complex and dynamic process. More...

The interaction between fungal pathogen and host during infection is a complex and dynamic process. To resolve this, we chose the zebrafish model organism as the host to study C. albicans infection via systems biology approach. Transcriptome microarray data and histological analysis of surviving fish were sampled at different post-infection time points. The dynamic variations of significant genes expression profiles in C. albicans and zebrafish were concurrently analyzed by principal component analysis (PCA). The PCA results clearly indicated that the infection of C. albicans can be divided into three phases that include adhesion, invasion and damage phases. The results were highly consistent with subsequent histological analysis. Furthermore, we found the primary ontology function of genes with significant variations in both C. albicans and zebrafish is iron related. Most of the iron related genes in C. albicans were over-expressed in late stage, while most of the iron related genes in zebrafish were suppressed at the same phase of infection. It suggested that the iron homeostasis function of the host was shut-down when massive hemorrhage in zebrafish occurred during later stages of infection. At the same time, the iron scavenging function of C. albicans was activated. This implied the competition for iron is an important issue between the host and the fungal pathogen during infection. When we administered excess iron into the microenvironment of infection site, the infection process was significantly delayed. That indicated the virulence of C. albicans is correlated with its protein-bond iron scavenging strategies. Our finings not only provided dynamic mechanistic views of the iron competition but also highlighted the potential regulatory schemes in fungal pathogenesis. Overall design: Each fish was intraperitoneally injected with C. albicans cells and these infected fish were collected at 0.5, 1, 2, 4, 6, 8, 12, 16, 18 hpi. 0.625μg of Cy3 cRNA for C. albicans array and 1.65 μg of Cy3 cRNA for zebrafish array was fragmented to an average size of about 50-100 nucleotides by incubation with fragmentation buffer at 60°C for 30 minutes. Each time points contain three biological repeat. For C. albicans array, each biological repeat has two technical replicates. Less...