Abstract
Michael Lorenz and Gerald Fink (Nature, 5 July) report that Candida albicans, a normal component of the mammalian gastrointestinal flora that is responsible for most fungal infections in immunosuppressed patients, employs the principal enzymes of the glyoxylate cycle when ingested by cells of the immune system. Importantly, mutant strains of C. albicans lacking one of the enzymes central to the glyoxylate cycle were much less virulent than wild type C. albicans. What is the importance of this? As most biochemistry undergraduates know, the glyoxylate cycle convert fats to glucose, a compound crucial to the metabolism of most organisms. Animals do not have a glyoxylate cycle and therefore cannot perform the fat-to-glucose conversion. The findings reported here suggest that it might be possible to target Candida infections by selectively blocking the function of one of the glyoxylate cycle enzymes. DM
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