Prioritization of drug targets as a goal of functional genomics in pathogenic fungi

抄録

During the last two decades, numerous scientists have focused on molecular studies of fungal pathogenesis and development of antifungal drugs, yet many problems haven't been resolved due to technical difficulties in studying specific fungi. With the completion of genome sequences of the major fungal pathogens, knowledge gained from study of a specific fungus can immediately be applied to other fungi, using genomics as a platform. Of several dozen fungal species causing disease in humans, Candida glabrata is the most amenable species for molecular biology. For this reason, C. glabrata is a good resource for basic studies that may be applicable to many pathogenic fungi. The C. glabrata phenome project consists of an effort to construct a library of strains bearing mutations in single genes. Essential genes will have a regulatable promoter inserted at the 5' position, whereas all dispensable genes will be knocked out.
The first aim of this project is prioritization of drug targets amongst the 5,300 C. glabrata genes. Genes representing potential new antifungal drug targets must be essential for growth, and highly conserved in other pathogenic fungi to ensure drugs will have a broad spectrum, but should not be conserved in the human genome. Consequently, a few dozen genes have been identified as the high priority candidates. In this talk we present the strategy of the prioritization and challenge of the fusion study of in silico and experimental research to develop new anti fungal drugs.