Constitutive ALS3 expression in Candida albicans enhances adhesion and biofilm formation of efg1, but not cph1 mutant strains.

Nicholas C Schena, Kassandra M Baker, Anna A Stark, Derek P Thomas, Ian A Cleary

PloS one 2023

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Adhesion to living and non-living surfaces is an important virulence trait of the fungal pathogen Candida albicans. Biofilm formation in this organism depends on the expression of a number of cell surface proteins including the hypha-specific protein Als3p. Loss of ALS3 impairs biofilm formation and decreases cell-cell adhesion. We wanted to test whether constitutively expressing ALS3 could compensate for defects in adhesion and biofilm formation observed in mutant strains that lack key transcriptional regulators of biofilm formation Efg1p and Cph1p. We found that ALS3 improved adhesion and biofilm formation in the efg1Δ and efg1Δ cph1Δ mutant strains, but had less effect on the cph1Δ strain. Copyright: © 2023 Schena et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Citation

Nicholas C Schena, Kassandra M Baker, Anna A Stark, Derek P Thomas, Ian A Cleary. Constitutive ALS3 expression in Candida albicans enhances adhesion and biofilm formation of efg1, but not cph1 mutant strains. PloS one. 2023;18(7):e0286547