Fungal antigenic variation using mosaicism and reassortment of subtelomeric genes’ repertoires
Meier, Caroline S.; Pagni, Marco; Richard, Sophie; Muhlethaler, Konrad; Almeida, João M.G.C.F.; Nevez, Gilles; Cushion, Melanie T.; Calderón Sandubete, Enrique José; Hauser, Philippe M.
- Published
- 2023-10-02
- Publisher
- Nature Research
- Language
- en
Abstract
Surface antigenic variation is crucial for major pathogens that infect humans. To escape the immune system, they exploit various mechanisms. Understanding these mechanisms is important to better prevent and fight the deadly diseases caused. Those used by the fungus Pneumocystis jirovecii that causes life-threatening pneumonia in immunocompromised individuals remain poorly understood. Here, though this fungus is currently not cultivable, our detailed analysis of the subtelomeric sequence motifs and genes encoding surface proteins suggests that the system involves the reassortment of the repertoire of ca. 80 non-expressed genes present in each strain, from which single genes are retrieved for mutually exclusive expression. Dispersion of the new repertoires, supposedly by healthy carrier individuals, appears very efficient because identical alleles are observed in patients from different countries. Our observations reveal a unique strategy of antigenic variation. They also highlight the possible role in genome rearrangements of small imperfect mirror sequences forming DNA triplexes.
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Corrections&amendments Publisher Correction: Fungal antigenic variation using mosaicism and reassortment of subtelomeric genes’repertoires Caroline S. Meier ,MarcoPagni , Sophie Richard, Konrad Mühlethaler, João M. G. C. F. Almeida , Gilles Nevez ,MelanieT.Cushion , Enrique J. Calderón & Philippe M. Hauser The original version of this Article contained an error in Fig. 1. In panels a and b the 3 black stars in each panel identifying the patients infected by a single strain were missing. These have now been added in panel a and b in Fig 1. In addition, in the Result section of the main text the tabs labelled “Table 1”and “Table 2”in Supplementary Data 6 were incorrectly referred to as “Supplementary Table 1”and Supplementary Table 2”; these are now referred to as “Table 1 in Supplementary Data 6”in the first and fourth sentence of the fifth paragraph, and “Table 2 in Supplementary Data 6”in the fifth sentence of the seventh paragraph. These errors have been corrected in both the PDF and HTML versions of the article. Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. © The Author(s) 2023 Correction to: Nature Communications https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-023-42685-6, published online 02 November 2023 https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-023-43993-7 Check for updates 1234567890():,; 1234567890():,; nature communications (2023) 14:7928 | 1
