Zebrafish Egg Infection Model for Studying Candida albicans Adhesion Factors

Disseminated candidiasis is associated with 30–40% mortality in severely immunocompromised patients. Among the causal agents, Candida albicans is the dominant one. Various animal models have been developed for investigating gene functions in C . albicans . Zebrafish injection models have increasingly been applied in elucidating C . albicans pathogenesis because of the conserved immunity, prolific fecundity of the zebrafish and the low costs of care systems. In this study, we established a simple, noninvasive zebrafish egg bath infection model, defined its optimal conditions, and evaluated the model with various C . albicans mutant strains. The deletion of SAP6 did not have significant effect on the virulence. By contrast, the deletion of BCR1 , CPH1 , EFG1 , or TEC1 significantly reduced the virulence under current conditions. Furthermore, all embryos survived when co-incubated with bcr1/bcr1 , cph1/cph1 efg1/efg1 , efg1/efg1 , or tec1/tec1 mutant cells. The results indicated that our novel zebrafish model is time-saving and cost effective.