Coupling Temperature Sensing and Morphogenesis in the Pathogenic Fungus Candida albicans
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Temperature is a critical environmental signal, which exerts powerful control over the development and virulence of diverse microbial pathogens. Fungi, along with other microbial species, exploit a diversity of mechanisms to sense and respond to temperature fluctuations that may be encountered in the host or under other conditions of temperature stress. For Candida albicans, the leading fungal pathogen of humans, temperature influences mating, phenotypic switching, resistance to antifungal drugs, and the morphogenetic transition from yeast to filamentous growth. C. albicans morphogenesis is strongly influenced by temperature, and most filament inducing cues depend on a concurrent increase of temperature to 37ËC before morphogenesis can occur. Further elevated temperature of 39ËC to 42ËC can serve as an independent filament-inducing cue, although the molecular mechanisms underpinning this temperature-dependent morphogenetic transition remain largely uncharacterized. Here, I provide the first comprehensive investigation of the molecular mechanisms mediating temperature-dependent morphogenesis in C. albicans. I establish that the thermally responsive molecular chaperone Hsp90 orchestrates temperature-dependent morphogenesis, and that Hsp90 functions as a key temperature sensor, such that elevated temperature is required to relieve Hsp90-mediated repression of the morphogenetic program. Further, I demonstrate that Hsp90 controls morphogenesis via at least two distinct cellular signaling cascades. First, Hsp90 and its co-chaperone Sgt1 physically interact, and together regulate protein kinase A (PKA) signaling via an interaction with the adenylyl cyclase of the PKA cascade, Cyr1, such that genetic depletion of either Hsp90 or Sgt1 activates PKA signaling and induces filamentation. Second, Hsp90 controls temperature-dependent morphogenesis via previously uncharacterized cellular circuitry comprised of the cyclin-dependent kinase Pho85, the cyclin Pcl1, and the transcriptional regulator Hms1. Together, this research illuminates the central role of Hsp90 in coupling temperature sensing and morphogenesis in the human fungal pathogen C. albicans.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".