Open AccessZebrafish Egg Infection Model for Studying Candida albicans Adhesion Factors
Author(s) -
Yin-Zhi Chen,
Yun-Liang Yang,
Wen-Li Chu,
May-Su You,
HsiuJung Lo
Publication year - 2015
Publication title -
plos one
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.99
H-Index - 332
ISSN - 1932-6203
DOI - 10.1371/journal.pone.0143048
Subject(s) - candida albicans , zebrafish , virulence , microbiology and biotechnology , biology , corpus albicans , mutant , gene , genetics
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.