But a florid fungus can be a dangerous beauty, able to coat medical implants with thin films causing serious complications in patients with hip and valve replacements. In fact, every year thousands of deaths can be traced to fungal infections around medical implants. Now, researchers at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research have found a key gene that allows fungi to stick to plastic surfaces and form thin coatings called biofilms. The gene, called FLO11, is required for fungal biofilm formation. The results, published in the February 2 issue of Science, come from Gerald Fink and Todd Reynolds, and lay the groundwork for finding ways to prevent biofilm formation.
Fungi represent a real medical threat because they can stick to plastic.
A fungal infection can lead to complications for contact lens wearers and more seriously patients with hip replacements. Our work represents a key step toward understanding how fungi stick to plastic and offers hope that it may be possible to prevent such infections in the future. This came as welcome news to geneticists who have long used yeast as a model for infectious fungi such as Candida. Also, many disease-causing organisms that form biofilms are difficult to work with in the laboratory. Knowing that bacteria use proteins on their surface to form biofilms, Reynolds, a postdoctoral fellow in the Fink lab and first author on the paper, set out to look for a yeast protein that allows them to stick to surfaces.