Section: New Results

Clavispora lusitaniae

Clavispora lusitaniae, an environmental saprophytic yeast belonging to the CTG clade of Candida and a teleomorph of Candida lusitaniae, is an environmentally ubiquitous ascomycetous yeast with no known specific ecological niche. It can be isolated from different substrates, such as soils, waters, plants, and gastrointestinal tracts of many animals including birds, mammals, and humans. In immunocompromised hosts, C. lusitaniae can be pathogenic and is responsible for about 1% of invasive candidiasis, particularly in pediatric and hematology-oncology patients.

The Laboratoire de Microbiologie Fondamentale et Pathogénicité UMR-CNRS 5234 and Pleiade sequenced and annotated the genome of C. lusitaniae type strain CBS 6936, and analyzed it in comparison with the strains ATCC 42720, isolated from the blood of a patient with myeloid leukemia, and MTCC 1001, a self-fertile strain isolated from citrus. In spite of a conserved genome structure, the genomes have undergone significant divergence. In particular the SNP density of 1 SNP per 90 bp is twice the level observed between strains SC5314 and WO-1 of Candida albicans, which are members of different subgroups within the species and qualified as having diverged relatively recently.

This work contributes to Pleiade 's long-term goal of developing understanding how diversity measured at the genome level can be made to correspond with observed functional diversity.