The secrets of Candida albicans: cell cycle genes and the underlying mechanisms of mating
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Sensing the surrounding environment and regulating cell division are key elements for a cell's survival and proliferation. Environmental sensing requires that signal transduction pathways detect stimuli by means of membrane receptors, and transfer this information to the transcription machinery in the nucleus. In eukaryotic cells, such processes involve several interconnected signaling pathways. Regulation of cell proliferation is one of the central targets of such signaling pathways, but our understanding of the connection between cell cycle progression and environmental sensing is limited to a few well-studied model organisms. In this thesis I investigated the function of C. albicans specific genes with a peak of expression during the mitotic transition phase, and studied how the MAP kinase cascade and cAMP pathway regulate the mating pheromone response. In the first part of the study, I created heterozygote versions of selected periodic C. albicans specific genes and monitored cellular response to a variety of stresses. Three heterozygous strains were found to be sensitive to specific anti-fungal drugs. Attempts to create homozygous disruptions were not successful, and only one conditional mutant was found in the Elitra Montreal GRACE library. This situation would have occurred if proper periodic expression of the genes were essential for proper proliferation of the cells. The investigation of the mating pheromone sensing and response gives us evidence of the positive and negative roles of the MAP kinase and cAMP pathways in pheromone response regulation. Deletion of the components of the components of the MAP kinase cascade impairs the pheromone response, however isolation of the pathway by overproducing the scaffold protein Far1 and constitutively activating it by deleting the inhibitor protein Cpp1 enhances the mating factor sensitivity. Reducing cAMP levels in the cell by removing the pathway regulator Ras1 and also inhibiting the transcription of the downstream genes by deleting the transcription factor Efg1 increases the cellular responsiveness to the mating pheromone. This study also rules out the possible connection and dependency of the two pathways in this process, as a strain with the deletion of the Ras1 protein and overproduction of Far1 protein is more sensitive to pheromone than the individual mutants.
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 | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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".