Morphotype transition and sexual reproduction are genetically associated in a ubiquitous environmental pathogen.

ABSTRACT: Sexual reproduction in an environmental pathogen helps maximize its lineage fitness to changing environment and the host. For the fungal pathogen Cryptococcus neoformans, sexual reproduction is proposed to have yielded hyper virulent and drug resistant variants. The life cycle of this pathogen commences with mating, followed by the yeast-hypha transition and hyphal growth, and it concludes with fruiting body differentiation and sporulation. How these sequential differentiation events are orchestrated to ensure developmental continuality is enigmatic. Here we revealed the genetic network of the yeast-to-hypha transition in Cryptococcus by analyzing transcriptomes of populations with a homogeneous morphotype generated by an engineered strain. Among this network, we found that a Pumilio-famil

SUBMITTER: Wang L 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4047104 | biostudies-literature | 2014 Jun

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature