Transcriptomic Analysis of the Candida albicans Response to Treatment with Cinnamaldehyde

Natural product cinnamaldehyde has significant antifungal activities, and its inhibitory activity against Candida albicans has been reported. Up to now, there are few reports on the changes in the transcriptome of Candida albicans after cinnamaldehyde treatment. Here, RNA sequencing analysis of samples obtained from Candida albicans cells grown in the presence or absence of cinnamaldehyde was performed. A total of 123 differentially expressed genes were identified, of which 15 genes were up-regulated and 108 genes were down-regulated. Overall design: Candida albicans strain SC5314 was grown in YPD medium overnight, washed with PBS and cultured in RPMI-1640 medium supplemented with 10% fetal bovine serum at 2 × 10^5 CFU/mL and incubated at 37 ? for 24 hours in the presence of cinnamaldehyde at 31.25 µg/mL. Considering that cinnamaldehyde was solubilized using DMSO, 5% DMSO treatment was used as a control group. Total RNA was extracted and mRNA enriched by magnetic beads with oligo (dT). The mRNA was randomly broken by adding fragmentation buffer. Short fragments of double-stranded cDNA generated by reverse transcription were subjected to end-repair, phosphorylation and 'A' base addition according to Illumina's library construction protocol. Libraries were size selected for cDNA target fragments of 300 bp on 2% Low Range Ultra Agarose followed by PCR amplified using Phusion DNA polymerase for 15 PCR cycles. After quantified by Qubit 4.0, paired-end RNA-seq sequencing library was sequenced with the NovaSeq 6000 sequencer (2 × 150 bp read length). Three biological replicates were obtained for each condition (control or cinnamaldehyde treated).