Finding a needle in a haystack – in silico search for environmental traces of Candida auris

Abstract

Candida auris, first described from an ear infection in Japan, is the most talked about multidrug resistant emerging pathogenic fungal species. Its environmental niche remained a mystery until its first isolation from wetlands of the Andaman Islands, India in 2020. We screened a subset of the world’s largest sequence repository, the Sequence Read Archive at NCBI using a DNA metabarcoding approach, based on either the ITS1 or ITS2 region of the official primary fungal DNA barcode, to identify potential environmental sources of C. auris. Our search identified 34 matches with partial C. auris ITS sequences from seven metabarcoding studies, providing wider evidence for the presence of C. auris outside human-maintained facilities.