Dataset Information

Functional Characterization of Clinical Isolates of the Opportunistic Fungal Pathogen Aspergillus nidulans.

ABSTRACT: Aspergillus nidulans is an opportunistic fungal pathogen in patients with immunodeficiency, and virulence of A. nidulans isolates has mainly been studied in the context of chronic granulomatous disease (CGD), with characterization of clinical isolates obtained from non-CGD patients remaining elusive. This study therefore carried out a detailed biological characterization of two A. nidulans clinical isolates (CIs), obtained from a patient with breast carcinoma and pneumonia and from a patient with cystic fibrosis that underwent lung transplantation, and compared them to the reference, nonclinical FGSC A4 strain. Both CIs presented increased growth in comparison to that of the reference strain in the presence of physiologically relevant carbon sources. Metabolomic analyses showed that the three strains are metabolically very different from each other in these carbon sources. Furthermore, the CIs were highly susceptible to cell wall-perturbing agents but not to other physiologically relevant stresses. Genome analyses identified several frameshift variants in genes encoding cell wall integrity (CWI) signaling components. Significant differences in CWI signaling were confirmed by Western blotting among the three strains. In vivo virulence studies using several different models revealed that strain MO80069 had significantly higher virulence in hosts with impaired neutrophil function than the other strains. In summary, this study presents detailed biological characterization of two A. nidulans sensu stricto clinical isolates. Just as in Aspergillus fumigatus, strain heterogeneity exists in A. nidulans clinical strains that can define virulence traits. Further studies are required to fully characterize A. nidulans strain-specific virulence traits and pathogenicity.IMPORTANCE Immunocompromised patients are susceptible to infections with opportunistic filamentous fungi from the genus Aspergillus Although A. fumigatus is the main etiological agent of Aspergillus species-related infections, other species, such as A. nidulans, are prevalent in a condition-specific manner. A. nidulans is a predominant infective agent in patients suffering from chronic granulomatous disease (CGD). A. nidulans isolates have mainly been studied in the context of CGD although infection with A. nidulans also occurs in non-CGD patients. This study carried out a detailed biological characterization of two non-CGD A. nidulans clinical isolates and compared the results to those with a reference strain. Phenotypic, metabolomic, and genomic analyses highlight fundamental differences in carbon source utilization, stress responses, and maintenance of cell wall integrity among the strains. One clinical strain had increased virulence in models with impaired neutrophil function. Just as in A. fumigatus, strain heterogeneity exists in A. nidulans clinical strains that can define virulence traits.

SUBMITTER: Bastos RW

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7142298 | biostudies-literature | 2020 Apr

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

ACCESS DATA

Publications

Functional Characterization of Clinical Isolates of the Opportunistic Fungal Pathogen Aspergillus nidulans.

Bastos Rafael Wesley RW Valero Clara C Silva Lilian Pereira LP Schoen Taylor T Drott Milton M Brauer Verônica V Silva-Rocha Rafael R Lind Abigail A Steenwyk Jacob L JL Rokas Antonis A Rodrigues Fernando F Resendiz-Sharpe Agustin A Lagrou Katrien K Marcet-Houben Marina M Gabaldón Toni T McDonnell Erin E Reid Ian I Tsang Adrian A Oakley Berl R BR Loures Flávio Vieira FV Almeida Fausto F Huttenlocher Anna A Keller Nancy P NP Ries Laure Nicolas Annick LNA Goldman Gustavo H GH

mSphere 20200408 2

Aspergillus nidulans is an opportunistic fungal pathogen in patients with immunodeficiency, and virulence of A. nidulans isolates has mainly been studied in the context of chronic granulomatous disease (CGD), with characterization of clinical isolates obtained from non-CGD patients remaining elusive. This study therefore carried out a detailed biological characterization of two A. nidulans clinical isolates (CIs), obtained from a patient with breast carcinoma and pneumonia a ...[more]

PMID: 32269156

Similar Datasets

Project description:Aspergillus fumigatus is a potentially deadly opportunistic fungal pathogen. Molecular studies have shaped our understanding of the genes, proteins, and molecules that contribute to A. fumigatus pathogenicity, but few studies have characterized genome-wide patterns of genetic variation at the population level. Of A. fumigatus genomic studies to-date, most focus mainly on single nucleotide polymorphisms and large structural variants, while overlooking the contribution of copy number variation (CNV). CNV is a class of small structural variation defined as loci that vary in their number of copies between individuals due to duplication, gain, or deletion. CNV can influence phenotype, including fungal virulence. In the present study, we characterized the population genomic patterns of CNV in a diverse collection of 71 A. fumigatus isolates using publicly available sequencing data. We used genome-wide single nucleotide polymorphisms to infer the population structure of these isolates and identified three populations consisting of at least 8 isolates. We then computationally predicted genome-wide CNV profiles for each isolate and conducted analyses at the species-, population-, and individual levels. Our results suggest that CNV contributes to genetic variation in A. fumigatus, with ~10% of the genome being CN variable. Our analysis indicates that CNV is non-randomly distributed across the A. fumigatus genome, and is overrepresented in subtelomeric regions. Analysis of gene ontology categories in genes that overlapped CN variants revealed an enrichment of genes related to transposable element and secondary metabolism functions. We further identified 72 loci containing 33 genes that showed divergent copy number profiles between the three A. fumigatus populations. Many of these genes encode proteins that interact with the cell surface or are involved in pathogenicity. Our results suggest that CNV is an important source of genetic variation that could account for some of the phenotypic differences between A. fumigatus populations and isolates.

Project description:The filamentous fungus Aspergillus nidulans has been a primary workhorse used to understand fungal genetics. Much of this work has focused on elucidating the genetics of biosynthetic gene clusters (BGCs) and the secondary metabolites (SMs) they produce. SMs are both niche defining in fungi and of great economic importance to humans. Despite the focus on A. nidulans, very little is known about the natural diversity in secondary metabolism within this species. We determined the BGC content and looked for evolutionary patterns in BGCs from whole-genome sequences of two clinical isolates and the A4 reference genome of A. nidulans Differences in BGC content were used to explain SM profiles determined using liquid chromatography-high-resolution mass spectrometry. We found that in addition to genetic variation of BGCs contained by all isolates, nine BGCs varied by presence/absence. We discovered the viridicatumtoxin BGC in A. nidulans and suggest that this BGC has undergone a horizontal gene transfer from the Aspergillus section Nigri lineage into Penicillium sometime after the sections Nigri and Nidulantes diverged. We identified the production of viridicatumtoxin and several other compounds previously not known to be produced by A. nidulans One isolate showed a lack of sterigmatocystin production even though it contained an apparently intact sterigmatocystin BGC, raising questions about other genes and processes known to regulate this BGC. Altogether, our work uncovers a large degree of intraspecies diversity in BGC and SM production in this genetic model species and offers new avenues to understand the evolution and regulation of secondary metabolism.IMPORTANCE Much of what we know about the genetics underlying secondary metabolite (SM) production and the function of SMs in the model fungus Aspergillus nidulans comes from a single reference genome. A growing body of research indicates the importance of biosynthetic gene cluster (BGC) and SM diversity within a species. However, there is no information about the natural diversity of secondary metabolism in A. nidulans We discovered six novel clusters that contribute to the considerable variation in both BGC content and SM production within A. nidulans We characterize a diverse set of mutations and emphasize how findings of single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs), deletions, and differences in evolutionary history encompass much of the variation observed in nonmodel systems. Our results emphasize that A. nidulans may also be a strong model to use within-species diversity to elucidate regulatory cross talk, fungal ecology, and drug discovery systems.

Project description:BACKGROUND: The production of bioethanol from lignocellulosic feedstocks will only become economically feasible when the majority of cellulosic and hemicellulosic biopolymers can be efficiently converted into bioethanol. The main component of cellulose is glucose, whereas hemicelluloses mainly consist of pentose sugars such as D-xylose and L-arabinose. The genomes of filamentous fungi such as A. nidulans encode a multiplicity of sugar transporters with broad affinities for hexose and pentose sugars. Saccharomyces cerevisiae, which has a long history of use in industrial fermentation processes, is not able to efficiently transport or metabolize pentose sugars (e.g. xylose). Subsequently, the aim of this study was to identify xylose-transporters from A. nidulans, as potential candidates for introduction into S. cerevisiae in order to improve xylose utilization. RESULTS: In this study, we identified the A. nidulans xtrD (xylose transporter) gene, which encodes a Major Facilitator Superfamily (MFS) transporter, and which was specifically induced at the transcriptional level by xylose in a XlnR-dependent manner, while being partially repressed by glucose in a CreA-dependent manner. We evaluated the ability of xtrD to functionally complement the S. cerevisiae EBY.VW4000 strain which is unable to grow on glucose, fructose, mannose or galactose as single carbon source. In S. cerevisiae, XtrD was targeted to the plasma membrane and its expression was able to restore growth on xylose, glucose, galactose, and mannose as single carbon sources, indicating that this transporter accepts multiple sugars as a substrate. XtrD has a high affinity for xylose, and may be a high affinity xylose transporter. We were able to select a S. cerevisiae mutant strain that had increased xylose transport when expressing the xtrD gene. CONCLUSIONS: This study characterized the regulation and substrate specificity of an A. nidulans transporter that represents a good candidate for further directed mutagenesis. Investigation into the area of sugar transport in fungi presents a crucial step for improving the S. cerevisiae xylose metabolism. Moreover, we have demonstrated that the introduction of adaptive mutations beyond the introduced xylose utilization genes is able to improve S. cerevisiae xylose metabolism.

Project description:The serum- and glucocorticoid-regulated protein kinase (SGK) is an AGC kinase involved in signal cascades regulated by glucocorticoid hormones and serum in mammals. The Saccharomyces cerevisiae ypk1 and ypk2 genes were identified as SGK homologues and Ypk1 was shown to regulate the balance of sphingolipids between the inner and outer plasma membrane. This investigation characterized the Aspergillus nidulans YPK1 homologue, YpkA, representing the first filamentous fungal YPK1 homologue. Two conditional mutant strains were constructed by replacing the endogenous ypk1 promoter with two different regulatable promoters, alcA (from the alcohol dehydrogenase gene) and niiA (from the nitrate reductase gene). Both constructs confirmed that ypkA was an essential gene in A. nidulans. Repression of ypkA caused decreased radial growth, a delay in conidial germination, deficient polar axis establishment, intense branching during late stages of growth, a lack of asexual spores, and a terminal phenotype. Membrane lipid polarization, endocytosis, eisosomes and vacuolar distribution were also affected by ypkA repression, suggesting that YpkA plays a role in hyphal morphogenesis via coordinating the delivery of cell membrane and wall constituents to the hyphal apex. The A. nidulans Pkh1 homologue pkhA was also shown to be an essential gene, and preliminary genetic analysis suggested that the ypkA gene is not directly downstream of pkhA or epistatic to pkhA, rather, ypkA and pkhA are genetically independent or in parallel. BarA is a homologue of the yeast Lag1 acyl-CoA-dependent ceramide synthase, which catalyzes the condensation of phytosphingosine with a fatty acyl-CoA to form phytoceramide. When barA was absent, ypkA repression was lethal to the cell. Therefore, there appears to be a genetic interaction between ypkA, barA, and the sphingolipid synthesis. Transcriptional profiling of ypkA overexpression and down-regulation revealed several putative YpkA targets associated with the observed phenotypes.

Dataset Information

Functional Characterization of Clinical Isolates of the Opportunistic Fungal Pathogen Aspergillus nidulans.

Publications

Functional Characterization of Clinical Isolates of the Opportunistic Fungal Pathogen Aspergillus nidulans.

Similar Datasets

OmicsDI is part of the ELIXIR infrastructure

Tweets