Transcriptomic characterization of Candida albicans in response to Aureobasidin treatment in vitro.

Purpose: Cellular response of Candida albicans to Aureobasidin A at transcriptomic level. Method: The transcriptome of C. albicans SC5314 upon exposure to 1 µg/ml AbA (0.5X Minimum Inhibitory Concentration) for three hours was analyzed by RNA sequencing (RNA-Seq) on Illumina HiSeq 4000 instrument using the 2 X 150 bp chemistry. Result: Following STAR-alignment of the quality-checked sequence reads against SC5314 reference genome and DESeq2 analysis of the read counts data, we identified 85 differentially-expressed genes between the AbA-treated cells and DMSO-treated controls, with false discovery rate <0.001 and a log2 fold change ≥ 1. Among them, 42 were significantly up-regulated and 43 were significantly down-regulated in AbA-treated cells as compared to the controls. The analysis of biological processes and molecular functions using Gene Ontology (GO) Term Finder of the Candida Genome Database (CGD) showed down-regulation of genes associated with cellular lipid biosynthetic process, and up-regulation of genes associated with regulation of membrane lipid distribution and floppase activity. The genes associated with cell aggregation, biofilm formation and DNA packaging were also affected. Conclusion: In summary, the analysis of transcriptomic data in this study provides beneficial and critical information contributing to our understanding of the cellular response of C. albicans to AbA and its antifungal activity. Transcriptomic profile of AbA-treated and DMSO-treated of C. albicans