Candida albicans Mutagenesis: Response to Stress

Abstract

Candida albicans is a model eukaryotic yeast and an opportunist human pathogen. It generates novel drug resistance through mutation and mitotic recombination. The rate loss of heterozygosity, or rate LoH, is a measure of this mutation and recombination. Previous research has shown that some stresses like the anti-fungal drug fluconazole cause the yeast cells to increase their rate LoH while other stresses do not. On the assumption that fluconazole does not directly affect DNA replication, it is possible that the increased rate LoH is due to a stress response pathway. My UROP project aimed to create a list of computationally curated gene targets using microarray expression data analysis which would then be tested for mutant phenotype rate LoH. The majority of the time allocated to the project was spent doing ortholog searches of gene lists curated from another yeast, Saccharomyces cerevisiae, as well as studying any previous papers where any of the orthologs in question were directly examined.