Zap1 Sticks It to Candida Biofilms

Kira Heller

doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.1000117

Abstract

Zap1 Sticks It to Candida Biofilms

Highlights

Microbes have a variety of strategies to protect themselves from environmental assaults, whether they are clinging to bare rock on windy cliffs or dwelling within multicellular organisms like humans
C. albicans biofilms are often resistant to antifungal drugs and can be the source of serious systemic infections; once an implanted medical device has been colonized by a C. albicans biofilm, the device almost always has to be removed
To learn more about how C. albicans biofilms are generated, Clarissa Nobile and her colleagues mutagenized wild-type yeast and screened for strains with defects in biofilm formation. They searched for the mutations associated with the defects and eventually identified a C. albicans mutant that produced a slimy-looking biofilm

Summary

Introduction

Microbes have a variety of strategies to protect themselves from environmental assaults, whether they are clinging to bare rock on windy cliffs or dwelling within multicellular organisms like humans. To learn more about how C. albicans biofilms are generated, Clarissa Nobile and her colleagues mutagenized wild-type yeast and screened for strains with defects in biofilm formation. To confirm that the slimy phenotype was caused by the loss of Zap1 protein function, Nobile et al Selected PLoS Biology research articles are accompanied by a synopsis written for a general audience to provide non-experts with insight into the significance of the published work.

Results

Conclusion