Project title : Identification of novel virulence affecting genes via the generation of Candida parapsilosis deletion library

Candida parapsilosis is an opportunistic pathogenic fungi species which has a constitutivelydiploid genome and lacks sexual cycle. In order to identify genes that are potentially involved in the fungi’s virulence, two approaches are accepted and used frequently: generation of null mutants or over-expression strains of a desired gene of interest. A part of our laboratory is currently using a previously described, auxotrophy complementation based gene knockout strategy to study gene function in Candida parapsilosis. In our recent work several fungal transcriptional factors and kinases have been identified using RNA-Seq data that were over-expressed during host-pathogen interactions. Our aim is to generate a knockout collection of these genes in order to identify new genes responsible for virulence. Besides these identified but not yet characterized factors, further ORFs have been selected and added to our ever-expanding knock out library, that might affect the fungi’s virulence for example via cell wall modification. The characterization of all the available homozygous deletion mutant strains has already been started and several of these showed altered phenotype (e.g. viability, virulence) when compared to the parental strain. In the future we seek to identify factors that may contribute to the development of a novel class of antifungal drugs.