Expansion of the functional genomics GRACE library reveals genes relevant for temperature-dependent fitness in Candida albicans
Bibliographic record
Abstract
A small percentage of species in the fungal kingdom can cause devastating infections in humans, with Candida albicans reigning as a leading cause of systemic disease. One of the key virulence phenotypes for pathogenic fungi is the ability to survive at host body temperature; however, a comprehensive understanding of the mechanisms that orchestrate thermal adaptation in fungi remains incomplete. In this study, we expand the largest functional genomics resource in C. albicans, reaching 71.3% coverage of the entire genome, and perform screens under six different temperatures to identify genes important for temperature-dependent fitness. We describe the function of genes involved in translation (GAR1), splicing (C1_11680C or YSF3), and cell cycle progression (C6_00110C or RHT1) in enabling fungal survival at both low and high temperatures. Through experimental evolution, we also show that C. albicans can rapidly overcome deleterious mutations and adapt to extreme temperature environments. Overall, our study highlights the transformative potential of genome-wide functional genomics to uncover critical vulnerabilities in pathogenic fungi.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| 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) | 0.000 | 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 teacher head, 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".