Special Interest Group Meeting

Functional Genomics of Candida glabrata – a systems approach in a non-model system

Ken Haynes, Imperial College London

In the mid 1990’s only a small number of genes had been sequenced cloned and inactivated in the fungal pathogen Candida glabrata. A decade and a half later, the genome has been sequenced, annotated, arrays designed and delivered to the community and a co-ordinated effort to construct a knock-out library and ORFeome is underway. Additionally the relatively close phylogentic relationship between C. glabrata and Saccharomyces cerevisiae has seen interest in this organism grow with respect to the evolution of protein-protein interactions.

Preliminary attempts to utilize these resources to analyse the response of C. glabrata to hyperosmotic and oxidative stress, individually and in combination, will be presented. The signaling pathway sensing osmostress differs in both structure and response to that seen in S. cerevisiae. We show that combinatorial stress exerts synergistic killing, and elicits a response that is totally dissimilar to that seen in response to individual stresses. Mathematical models and graphical representations of these data will be presented and show that these approaches add significant value to data interpretation.

Finally, hopefully this presentation will show that non model organisms are tractable at a systems level, and that you don’t have to be a super group to embark on such a voyage.

This work is a collaboration between Imperial College London & the University of Aberdeen. It is funded by the BBSRC SABR grant Combinatorial Responses in Stress Pathways (CRISP).