Abstract

This study focuses on understanding the transcriptional regulatory relationships in the fungal organism Candida albicans (C. albicans). We are particularly focused on zinc cluster transcription factors (ZCTFs) characterized by a conserved CX2CX6CX5–12CX2CX6–8C DNA binding domain. In general, the ~82 ZCTFs are known to be involved in a range processes including invasive growth, mating strategy and drug resistance. In this study, we make use of RNA- sequencing-based transcriptional profiles for a subset of 30 of these ZCTFs that were developed previously into gain of function mutants.
Our goals were (1) to ensure that the collection of transcriptional profiles were developed into a useful resource where hypotheses could be tested quickly with the assurance that the underlying data is sound, clean and largely free of technical artifacts; (2) to catalogue the global expression patterns across the cohort of ZCTFs and provide insight into the underlying biologies present across the ZCTF family while at the same time enumerating genes, pathways and processes that are unique or nearly unique to each of the ZCTFs in order to provide insight into the specific function of each member; and (3) to produce hypotheses from our correlative analysis regarding potential causative, regulatory relationships both between the ZCTFs and with other transcription factors.
The raw and normalized data, the code used throughout our analysis and the resultant analyses are available via a github repository.