Project description:Sexual reproduction facilitates infection by the production of both a lineage advantage and infectious sexual spores in the ubiquitous human fungal pathogen Cryptococcus deneoformans. However, the regulatory determinants specific for initiating mating remain poorly understood. Here, we identified a velvet family regulator, Cva1, that strongly promotes sexual reproduction in C. deneoformans. This regulation was determined to be specific, based on a comprehensive phenotypic analysis of cva1 under 25 distinct in vitro and in vivo growth conditions. We further revealed that Cva1 plays a critical role in the initiation of early mating events, especially sexual cell-cell fusion, but is not important for the late sexual development stages or meiosis. Thus, Cva1 specifically contributes to mating activation. Importantly, a novel mating-responsive surface protein, Cfs1, serves as the key target of Cva1 during mating, since its absence nearly blocks cell-cell fusion in C. deneoformans and its sister species C. neoformans. Together, our findings provide insight into how C. deneoformans ensures regulatory specificity of mating.
