Artigo Acesso aberto Produção Nacional Revisado por pares

Phenotypic analysis of genes whose mRNA accumulation is dependent on calcineurin in Aspergillus fumigatus

2009; Academic Press; Volume: 46; Issue: 10 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1016/j.fgb.2009.06.009

ISSN

1096-0937

Autores

Iran Malavazi, Márcia Eliana da Silva Ferreira, Frederico Marianetti Soriani, Taísa Magnani Dinamarco, Marcela Savoldi, Sérgio Akira Uyemura, Maria Helena S. Goldman, Gustavo H. Goldman,

Tópico(s)

Peptidase Inhibition and Analysis

Resumo

Calcineurin plays an important role in the control of cell morphology and virulence in fungi. Calcineurin is a serine/threonine-specific protein phosphatase heterodimer consisting of a catalytic subunit A and a regulatory subunit B. A mutant of Aspergillus fumigatus lacking the calcineurin A (calA) catalytic subunit exhibited defective hyphal morphology related to apical extension and branching growth, which resulted in drastically decreased filamentation. Here, we investigated which pathways are influenced by A. fumigatus calcineurin during proliferation by comparatively determining the transcriptional profile of A. fumigatus wild type and ΔcalA mutant strains. Our results showed that the mitochondrial copy number is reduced in the ΔcalA mutant strain, and the mutant has increased alternative oxidase (aoxA) mRNA accumulation and activity. Furthermore, we identified four genes that encode transcription factors that have increased mRNA expression in the ΔcalA mutant. Deletion mutants for these transcription factors had reduced susceptibility to itraconazole, caspofungin, and sodium dodecyl sulfate (SDS).

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