Boekhout Lab

29 May 2018
Candida auris, C. haemulonii, C. duobushaemulonii, and C. pseudohaemulonii are closely related and highly multidrug resistant yeast pathogens. The high cost and low accuracy of current diagnostics may underestimate their prevalence, especially in medical resource-limited regions. In this study, we used 172 C. auris stains and its relatives and 192 other fungal strains to establish and validate a novel multiplex end-point PCR. A prospective and a retrospective clinical screenings using this assay were further performed in China and Iran respectively. We identified the first isolate of C. pseudohaemulonii in China and the first isolate of C. haemulonii in Iran from 821 clinical isolates in total, without any false positive. Animal models of C. auris and C. haemulonii were established for validation. The overall positive rates of the assay for mice blood and tissue were 28.6 and 92.9%, respectively. Compared with previously developed assays, our assay is more available and affordable to the developing countries, and may contribute to a better understanding of the epidemiology of C. auris and its relatives in these regions.
24 Oct 2017
Aspergillus terreus infections are difficult to treat because of the intrinsic resistance to amphotericin B, and higher mortality compared to infections caused by other Aspergillus species. The aim of the present study was to determine the in vitro antifungal activity of amphotericin B and 11 comparators against clinical (n = 36) and environmental (n = 45) A. terreus isolates. In vitro antifungal susceptibility was performed using the CLSI M38‐A2 procedure. Amphotericin B exhibited the highest MICs (MIC range, 0.125‐4 μg/mL; MIC90, 2 μg/mL), followed by terbinafine (MIC range, 0.002‐1 μg/mL; MIC90, 1 μg/mL). Only one isolate (1/81) showed amphotericin B MIC above the epidemiologic cut‐off value (ECV; 4 μg/mL). None of the isolates had a MIC of ≥ ECV for voriconazole, itraconazole and posaconazole. The reasons for the difference in amphotericin B susceptibility patterns between studies remain unknown. The genetic and species diversity, clinical, environmental and ecological factors in Terrei section on various amphotericin B susceptibility profiles in different countries should be considered more as the main reasons associated with these differences.
12 Jan 2018
ABSTRACT: Online sequence databases such as NCBI GenBank serve as a tremendously useful platform for researchers to share and reuse published data. However, submission systems lack control for errors such as organism misidentification, which once entered in the database can be propagated and mislead downstream analyses. Here we present an illustrating case of misidentification of Candida albicans ...