Molecular Biology Of Pathogenic Fungi

The diagnosis and therapy of mycosis keep being very difficult problems in clinical practices. With the increasing incidence of fungal infections, interests of studies on pathogenic fungi and mycosis have been agitated greatly. Many achievements have been obtained since mordern molecular biological techniques were established in the field. We applied techniques of molecular cloning,pulsed field gel electrophoresis (PFGE) and molecular hybridization analysis etc in our studies on systemic fungi Penicillum marneffei and Candida albicans.1. The gene library of P. marneffei was constructed. Three species —specific DNA probes for P. marneffei were isolated from the library with the sizes of 5kb, 1kb and 0. 6kb respectively.2. Pulsed field gel electrophoresis was introduced into the characterization of filamentous fungal genomes. Chromsomes larger than 3 megabase were separated under a set of parameters which are different from those used traditionally. This set of parameters makes it possible to separate very large chromosomes ( > 3Mb) within quite shorter run time than before.3. Aproppriate conditions for analysing P. marneffei genome with PFGE was set up. Genome of P. marneffei was characterized. Three chromosomes with sizes of 4. 6Mb, 3. 5Mb and 1. 0Mb respectively constitute the genome.4. Ca3 patterns of some Candida albicans distributed in China was investigated. We discussed the method now being used to analyze Ca3 patterns and suggested our method. With ours we found there seemed the tendancy of genetic separations among C. albicans caused infections in different locations.5. A rapid and simple approach of fungal total DNA isolation was set up.