Whole RNA-sequencing and transcriptome assembly of Candida albicans and Candida africana under chlamydospore-inducing conditions

Abstract

Candida albicans is the most common cause of life-threatening fungal infections in humans, especially in immunocompro-mised individuals. Crucialto its success as an opportunistic pathogenis the considerable dynamismofits genome, which readily undergoes genetic changes generating new phenotypes and shaping the evolution of new strains. Candida africana is an intriguing C. albicans biovariant strain that exhibits remarkable genetic and phenotypic differences when compared with standard C. albicans isolates. Candida africana is well-known for its low degree of virulence compared with C. albicans and for its inability to produce chlamydospores that C. albicans, characteristically, produces under certain environmental conditions. Chlamydospores arelarge, spherical structures, whose biological functionisstill unknown. For this reason, wehave sequenced, assembled, and annotated the whole transcriptomes obtained from an efficient C. albicans chlamydospore-producing clinical strain (GE1), compared with the natural chlamydospore-negative C. africana clinical strain (CBS 11016). The transcriptomes of both C. albicans (GE1) and C. africana (CBS 11016) clinical strains, grown under chlamydospore-inducing conditions, were sequenced and assembled into 7,442 (GE1 strain) and 8,370 (CBS 11016 strain) high quality transcripts, respectively. The release of the first assembly of the C. africana transcriptome will allow future comparative studiesto better understand the biology and evolution of this important human fungal pathogen.