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Dear Colleagues,

Infectious diseases, which are disorders caused by pathogens such as bacteria, viruses, fungi, or parasites, pose a serious threat to humans, animals, and plants. Pathogens can interact with the host to suppress or evade the host immune systems in order to establish and disseminate the infections.

Unique genome features contribute largely to the events of host–pathogen interactions, governing the virulence level of pathogens and infection severity of the host. With the advancement of NGS and nanopore sequencing, it is now highly cost-effective to pursue genomic and transcriptomic studies. Recent research has shown that host–pathogen interaction can be bi-directionally modulated by small RNAs which come from unique genome loci. Under the current COVID-19 pandemic, there is a surge in the development of SARS-CoV-2 detection methods based on the study of phylogenomics and mutations of viral genomes.

We invite researchers to contribute original research articles and reviews focused on different genomics aspects of i) infectious diseases and ii) host–pathogen interactions.

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to, the following:

Genomics and transcriptomics;
Phylogenetics and evolution;
Small RNA regulations;
RNA biology (e.g., Dual-RNA-Seq);
Molecular pathogenesis;
Molecular detection.

Dr. Franklin W.N. Chow
Guest Editor

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Related Special Issue

Published Papers (1 paper)

Research

20 pages, 2280 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Reprogramming in Candida albicans Gene Expression Network under Butanol Stress Abrogates Hyphal Development

by Rajesh Anand, Mohammad Kashif, Awadhesh Pandit, Ram Babu and Agam P. Singh

Int. J. Mol. Sci. 2023, 24(24), 17227; https://doi.org/10.3390/ijms242417227 - 07 Dec 2023

Cited by 1 | Viewed by 1015

Abstract

Candida albicans is the causative agent of invasive fungal infections. Its hyphae-forming ability is regarded as one of the important virulence factors. To unravel the impact of butanol on Candida albicans, it was placed in O^+ve complete human serum with butanol (1% v/v). The Candida transcriptome under butanol stress was then identified by mRNA sequencing. Studies including electron microscopy demonstrated the inhibition of hyphae formation in Candida under the influence of butanol, without any significant alteration in growth rate. The numbers of genes upregulated in the butanol in comparison to the serum alone were 1061 (20 min), 804 (45 min), and 537 (120 min). Candida cells exhibited the downregulation of six hypha-specific transcription factors and the induction of four repressor/regulator genes. Many of the hypha-specific genes exhibited repression in the medium with butanol. The genes related to adhesion also exhibited repression, whereas, among the heat-shock genes, three showed inductions in the presence of butanol. The fungal-specific genes exhibited induction as well as repression in the butanol-treated Candida cells. Furthermore, ten upregulated genes formed the core stress gene set in the presence of butanol. In the gene ontology analysis, enrichment of the processes related to non-coding RNA, ribosome biosynthesis, and metabolism was observed in the induced gene set. On the other side, a few GO biological process terms, including biofilm formation and filamentous growth, were enriched in the repressed gene set. Taken together, under butanol stress, Candida albicans is unable to extend hyphae and shows growth by budding. Many of the genes with perturbed expression may have fitness or virulence attributes and may provide prospective sites of antifungal targets against C. albicans. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Genomics: Infectious Disease and Host-Pathogen Interaction 3.0)

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