This skeleton will be fleshed out as sketched below. For now, please read the primer on Pc below. Please e-mail Chuck Staben or the Pc Genome newsgroup with facts or questions. Pathways, biochemistry, etc. In AIDS patients, PcP remains a problem because of limited therapeutic choices and adverse reactions to the 2 standard treatment regimens, trimethoprim-sulfamethoxazole and pentamidine isethionate.
P c are unusual for a variety of reasons.
Although first identified in 1909 by Carlos Chagas, a long term in vitro culture system remains elusive. The lack of a culture system has hindered progress in understanding their basic biological processes resulting in an incomplete understanding of the Pc life cycle, mode of transmission, and metabolic function. Organisms intractable to in vitro culture provide few opportunities for large scale drug development as evidenced by the limited therapeutic repertoire with which to treat PcP. Likewise, rational control of infection in susceptible populations is hindered by a lack of known reservoirs, unidentified infective form, and method of communicating the infection. Unlike any extant fungus, Pc possesses only 1-2 copies of the nuclear ribosomal RNA locus and has little to no ergosterol. The characteristics of the rDNA locus as well as insights into what constitutes an essential core of a eukaryotic genome will be revealed by the proposed genome project.