Comparative transcriptomics of infectious spores from the fungal pathogen Histoplasma capsulatum G217B
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ABSTRACT: Histoplasma capsulatum is a fungal pathogen that infects both healthy and immunocompromised hosts. In endemic regions, H. capsulatum grows in the soil and causes respiratory and systemic disease when inhaled by humans. An interesting aspect of H. capsulatum biology is that it adopts specialized developmental programs in response to its environment. In the soil, it grows as filamentous chains of cells (mycelia) that produce asexual spores (conidia). When the soil is disrupted, conidia aerosolize and are inhaled by mammalian hosts. Inside a host, conidia germinate into yeast-form cells that colonize immune cells and cause disease. Despite the ability of conidia to initiate infection and disease, they have not been explored on a molecular level. Here we develop methods to purify H. capsulatum conidia and show that these cells germinate into either filaments at room temperature or into yeast-form cells at 37C. Conidia internalized by macrophages germinate into the yeast form and proliferate within the macrophages, ultimately lysing the host cells. Similarly, infection of mice with purified conidia is sufficient to establish infection and yield viable yeast-form cells in vivo. To characterize conidia on a molecular level, we perform whole-genome expression profiling of conidia, yeast, and mycelia from two highly diverged H. capsulatum strains. In parallel, we use homology and protein domain analysis to manually annotate the predicted genes of both strains. Analyses of the resultant data define sets of transcripts that reflect the unique molecular states of H. capsulatum conidia, yeast and mycelia. This series gives the results for the G217B strain.
ORGANISM(S): Histoplasma capsulatum
PROVIDER: GSE45415 | GEO | 2013/04/10
SECONDARY ACCESSION(S): PRJNA193984
REPOSITORIES: GEO
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