Electrophoretic Karyotypes of Candida Yeasts Recurrently Isolated from Single Patients

Abstract

Candida strains were isolated repeatedly from single patients during recurrent episodes of Candida infection in a hospital, and their electrophoretic karyotypes were analyzed by pulsedfield gel electrophoresis using CHEF system. When only C. albicans (in 6 patients) or C. glabrata (in 1 patient) were recurrently isolated, their karyotypes from each patient were almost identical to one another, suggesting that they carried single type of the yeast. When multiple species were recovered from single patients (6 cases), the karyotypes of the most frequently recovered yeast species were almost identical with respect to each patient. The electrophoretic karyotype analysis has been proved to be useful for epidemiological studies because the method can tell not only the species identification but also the differences among the strains of the same species.

The Ins and Outs of DNA Fingerprinting the Infectious Fungi

“…were maintained over time in the oral-esophageal cavity (18,19,35,101,269,322,419). Similar results have been obtained for patients with other compromising conditions (10,18,19,67,98,101,116,196,205,218,265,274,275,288,289,333,336,365,403,404,409,419) and for patients infected with fungi other than C. albicans (see, e.g., references 43, 81, 118, 121, 178, 337, 365, 375, and 412). For instance, in 1989, Fox et al used Southern blot hybridization of EcoRI-digested DNA with probe 27A to demonstrate that serial isolates from each of eight immunosuppressed patients collected over a 2-to 18-month period were genetically identical (116).…”

“…However, Holmberg and Feroze (139) showed technical variability for CHEF due to reagents, sample preparation, and running conditions. Electrophoretic karyotyping has been used extensively to fingerprint C. albicans (10,18,21,22,23,26,38,96,97,98,107,148,174,191,198,204,207,208,209,219,226,229,266,269,274,322,349,381,382,384,399,403,407,410,426), C. stellatoidea (171), C. glabrata (81,107,337,398), C. lusitaniae (163,220,398), C. tropicalis (95,107,399), C. parapsilosis (39,63,…”

Genomic polymorphism in the population of Candida glabrata: Gene copy-number variation and chromosomal translocations

“…Variations of karyotypes between C. glabrata strains have been previously observed, but concern mostly the two largest chromosomes, XII and XIII (Barchiesi et al, 1999;Doi et al, 1994;Fodor et al, 2002;Kaufmann and Merz, 1989;Khattak et al, 1992;Magee and Magee, 1987;Schwab et al, 1997;Vazquez et al, 1993), that bear the repeated rDNA loci known to be variable in copy number (Asakura et al, 1991;Dujon et al, 2004). We have re-examined this question in a more extensive manner using a collection of 183 C. glabrata strains, isolated mainly from patients, with three strains from the environment (see Section 2).…”

Genomic Plasticity of the Human Fungal Pathogen Candida albicans

“…1B). The highly variable electrophoretic karyotypes observed with clinical isolates of C. albicans are an indication of the extensive GCRs that can occur during growth in the host (9,47,48,142,160). Even greater karyotypic variability is observed with clinical isolates of Candida glabrata (145) and Candida dubliniensis (116), suggesting that karyotype variability is common in at least several medically relevant fungal pathogens.…”