Open AccessCell wall glycans and soluble factors determine the interactions between the hyphae of Candida albicans and Pseudomonas aeruginosa
Author(s) -
Brand Alexandra,
Barnes Julia D.,
Mackenzie Kevin S.,
Odds Frank C.,
Gow Neil A.R.
Publication year - 2008
Publication title -
fems microbiology letters
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.899
H-Index - 151
eISSN - 1574-6968
pISSN - 0378-1097
DOI - 10.1111/j.1574-6968.2008.01301.x
Subject(s) - candida albicans , microbiology and biotechnology , hypha , lysis , pseudomonas aeruginosa , corpus albicans , biology , cell wall , bacteria , biochemistry , genetics
Abstract The fungus, Candida albicans , and the bacterium, Pseudomonas aeruginosa , are opportunistic human pathogens that have been coisolated from diverse body sites. Pseudomonas aeruginosa suppresses C. albicans proliferation in vitro and potentially in vivo but it is the C. albicans hyphae that are killed while yeast cells are not. We show that hyphal killing involves both contact‐mediated and soluble factors. Bacterial culture filtrates contained heat‐labile soluble factors that killed C. albicans hyphae. In cocultures, localized points of hyphal lysis were observed, suggesting that adhesion and subsequent bacteria‐mediated cell wall lysis is involved in the killing of C. albicans hyphae. The glycosylation status of the C. albicans cell wall affected the rate of contact‐dependent killing because mutants with severely truncated O ‐linked, but not N ‐linked, glycans were hypersensitive to Pseudomonas ‐mediated killing. Deletion of HWP1 , ALS3 or HYR1 , which encode major hypha‐associated cell wall proteins, had no effect on fungal susceptibility.