This was the work of many undergraduates in the lab, supervised and led over the years by student-turned-postdoc Pete Stuckey. To learn more about it, see the news article below. Thank you and congratulations to all the authors! fungilab.nd.edu/news/elucida...

The protein is conserved in the fungal kingdom, but almost everything we know about it comes from S. cerevisiae. Relative to baker’s yeast, it seems Vac8 has both similar and unique functions in C. neoformans. Thus, we are happy to have started working on this new fungal cell biology story!

We found that deleting VAC8 causes fragmented vacuoles, and defective vacuolar fusion or enlargement, affecting the biology of the fungus in big ways, including no Titan Cells! Some of the phenotypes were negative, while others, like increased resistance to fluconazole, were surprising!

Following our initial paper (doi.org/10.1126/scia...) in the new preprint we report the bladder-specific Efg1 regulon promoting C. albicans CAUTI. With the increased incidence of fungal CAUTI and the high mortality of fungal infections, this knowledge is vital for developing new targeted treatments.

Hospital-acquired infections are deadly, and catheter-associated urinary ones (CAUTIs) are the most common. CAUTIs are more challenging when the microbe is/involves a fungus. Fungal CAUTIs are neglected, thus we started this collaboration to shed light on this common but neglected disease. (2/3)

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