Genome-wide transcriptional changes under oxidative stress in iron-starved Aspergillus fumigatus cultures

Aspergillus fumigatus has to cope with a combination of several stress types in the human body, and the interplay between the different stress responses can significantly influence the survival of this human pathogen during the invasion of the host organism. In this study, we examined how the H2O2 induced oxidative stress response depends on iron availability. Surprisingly, the applied H2O2 treatment, which induced only a negligible stress response in iron fed cultures, deleteriously affected the fungus under iron starvation and the majority of observed transcriptome-level stress responses were characteristic only for the combined H2O2-iron starvation stress treatments. Our data suggest that the survival of the fungus highly depended on fragile balances, e.g. between siderophore and ergosterol productions or between economization on iron and production of essential iron containing proteins. The applied stress conditions also affected several processes related to virulence or drug susceptibility including secondary metabolism, zinc acquisition or antifungal drug transport. Our data clearly demonstrate that studying stress responses under single stress treatments is not sufficient at all to understand how fungal pathogens survive in a complex habitat and support the view that the evolutionary success of A. fumigatus as an opportunistic human pathogen is not the mere consequence of the productions of certain virulence factors. Importantly, this fungal pathogen is able to mount and coordinate high-complexity and outstandingly efficient responses to multiple and superpositioning stresses in various harsh habitats like the human body. Overall design: Control (untreated), hydrogen-peroxide treated, iron-starved as well as hydrogen-peroxide treated and iron-starved A. fumigatus cultures were studied in three independent experiments (3x4 RNAseq data sets).

Identifier
Source https://data.blue-cloud.org/search-details?step=~01291A2CD1E9B1B3E2591FB2CEE7BBECC9BD184B30D
Metadata Access https://data.blue-cloud.org/api/collections/91A2CD1E9B1B3E2591FB2CEE7BBECC9BD184B30D
Provenance
Instrument Illumina HiScanSQ; ILLUMINA
Publisher Blue-Cloud Data Discovery & Access service; ELIXIR-ENA
Contributor University of Debrecen
Publication Year 2024
OpenAccess true
Contact blue-cloud-support(at)maris.nl
Representation
Discipline Marine Science
Temporal Point 2018-01-03T00:00:00Z