The application of genome-wide expression profiling to determine how drugs achieve their therapeutic effect has provided the pharmaceutical industry with an exciting new tool for drug mode-of-action studies. We used DNA chip technology to study cellular responses to perturbations of ergosterol biosynthesis caused by the broad-spectrum antifungal agent itraconazole. Simultaneous examination of o...

AIMS The aim of this work was to study the responses of Saccharomyces bayanus cells exposed to sub-lethal high-pressure homogenization (HPH) and determine whether the plasmatic membrane can sense HPH in the presence, or absence, of exogenous unsaturated fatty acids (UFAs) in the growth medium. METHODS AND RESULTS High-pressure homogenization damaged and caused the collapse of cell walls and m...

We developed a rapid, sensitive, and reproducible assay to quantify Candida albicans ACT1, CDR1, CDR2, ERG11, and MDR1 mRNA using a two-step reverse transcription and LightCycler real-time PCR (RT-LightCycler PCR) method with sequence-specific hybridization probes. We compared RT-LightCycler PCR with Northern hybridization for quantitative analysis of gene expression in isolates with various fl...

This study shows that antifungal curcumin (CUR), significantly depletes ergosterol levels in Candida albicans. CUR while displaying synergy with fluconazole (FLC) lowers ergosterol. However, CUR alone at its synergistic concentration (lower than MIC50), could not affect ergosterol contents. For deeper insight of CUR effects on lipids, we performed high throughput mass spectroscopy (MS) based li...

Antifungal azoles are the major drugs that are used to treat fungal infections. This study found that in response to antifungal azole stress, Neurospora crassa could activate the transcriptional responses of many genes and increase azole resistance by reducing the level of conidial separation 1 (CSP-1), a global transcription repressor, at azole-responsive genes. The expression of csp-1 was dir...

The binding and cytochrome P45051 (CYP51) inhibition properties of a novel antifungal compound, VT-1161, against purified recombinant Candida albicans CYP51 (ERG11) and Homo sapiens CYP51 were compared with those of clotrimazole, fluconazole, itraconazole, and voriconazole. VT-1161 produced a type II binding spectrum with Candida albicans CYP51, characteristic of heme iron coordination. The bin...

OBJECTIVES In this study we investigated the in vitro fungistatic and fungicidal activities of CPA18 and CPA109, two azole compounds with original structural features, alone and in combination with fluconazole against fluconazole-susceptible and -resistant Candida albicans strains. METHODS Antifungal activities were measured by MIC evaluation and time-kill studies. Azole binding analysis was ...