Abstract

Nosocomial blood stream infections and candidemia caused by the opportunistic fungal pathogen, Candida albicans, represent a serious medical problem. Hence, there is a great need to better understand the signalling and/or regulatory pathways that confers sensitivity and/or resistance to a given class of antifungal agent for this fungal pathogen. The main aim of the present study was to use a modified version of the gene replacement and conditional expression (GRACE) library to study the interactions between anti-fungal drugs (fluconazole, posaconazole and amphotericin B) and a set of non-conditional mutants in non-essential C. albicans genes. Further, the utility of using the modified version (GRACE v1.0) of GRACE library in comparison to the parent GRACE library was assessed. Overall, my findings showed that the chemogenomic profiles within drug classes were highly similar. The small amount of overlap between classes suggests that different drug classes interact with discrete networks of C. albicans genes. Importantly, my findings also demonstrate that screening of compounds, specifically azoles, in GRACE parent library may result in false positive findings possibly due to interaction with tetracycline. Future work involving further characterization of non-essential C. albicans genes is warranted to better understand the biology this model organism.