Mucormycosis is an invasive fungal infection caused by certain members of the filamentous fungal order Mucorales. It most frequently occurs in patients who have an underlying immunocompromised status due to immunosuppressive treatment or haematological malignancy. The species most frequently identified as the etiological agents of mucormycosis belong to the genera Rhizopus, Lichtheimia and Mucor. The frequency of systemic mucormycosis has been increasing, mainly because of the elevating ratio of susceptible population.
Furthermore, Mucorales fungi display intrinsic resistance to the majority of routinely used antifungal agents (e.g., echinocandins and azoles), which also limits the number of possible therapeutic options. All of the above mentioned issues urge the improvement of molecular identification methods and the discovery of new antifungal targets.To achieve these goals, clarification of the pathomechanism of mucormycosis, understanding the interaction of these fungi with their hosts, and the identification of potential virulence factors and new biomarkers are essential. All these studies need the adaptation and routine application of molecular and genetic manipulation methods. Appropriate tools for genetic manipulation, including efficient and reliable methods for genetic transformation, are basic requirements of cell biological and molecular studies, as well as of strain improvement by genetic and metabolic engineering.
As recent results have pointed out the importance of the CotH protein family in connection with virulence, our research was focused mainly on the extensive analysis of these genes and the clarification of their role in the virulence. However, that only a subset of the putative spore surface proteins identified in the Mucor genome showed homology to Rhizopus proteins associated with fungal pathogenicity. Thus, we also had to consider the possibility that the CotH family is a diverse group of proteins involved in many biological processes, and so forth we designed several experiments to elucidate the role of spore surface proteins in Mucor. Based on this, we attempted to perform the functional analysis of the CotH proteins, which involved monitoring the phenotypic alterations of genetically stable mutants created using CRISPR-Cas9 system. To reveal whether CotH proteins play a role in the pathogenesis and other biological processes of the Mucor circinelloides fungus
