Metal Chelation as a Powerful Strategy to Probe Cellular Circuitry Governing Fungal Drug Resistance and Morphogenesis.

ABSTRACT: Fungal pathogens have evolved diverse strategies to sense host-relevant cues and coordinate cellular responses, which enable virulence and drug resistance. Defining circuitry controlling these traits opens new opportunities for chemical diversity in therapeutics, as the cognate inhibitors are rarely explored by conventional screening approaches. This has great potential to address the pressing need for new therapeutic strategies for invasive fungal infections, which have a staggering impact on human health. To explore this approach, we focused on a leading human fungal pathogen, Candida albicans, and screened 1,280 pharmacologically active compounds to identify those that potentiate the activity of echinocandins, which are front-line therapeutics that target fungal cell wall synthesis. We

SUBMITTER: Polvi EJ 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5047589 | biostudies-literature | 2016 Oct

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature