The ongoing West African Ebola epidemic highlights a recurring trend in the zoonotic
emergence of virulent pathogens likely to come from bat reservoirs that has caused …

Few among the millions of fungal species fulfill four basic conditions necessary to infect
humans: high temperature tolerance, ability to invade the human host, lysis and absorption …

Calcium measurements in acidic vacuolar compartments of living cells are few, primarily
because calibration of fluorescent probes for calcium requires knowledge of pH and the pH …

The ability of pathogenic fungi to switch between a multicellular hyphal and unicellular yeast
growth form is a tightly regulated process known as dimorphic switching. Dimorphic …

Many of the major human fungal pathogens are known to undergo morphological changes,
which in certain cases are associated with virulence. Although there has been an intense …

Vesicular secretion of macromolecules has recently been described in the basidiomycete
Cryptococcus neoformans, raising the question as to whether ascomycetes similarly utilize …

Until recently, Histoplasma capsulatum was believed to harbour three varieties, var.
capsulatum (chiefly a New World human pathogen), var. duboisii (an African human …

Microbial pathogens that normally inhabit our environment can adapt to thrive inside
mammalian hosts. There are six dimorphic fungi that cause disease worldwide, which switch …

The signature feature of systemic dimorphic fungi–a family of six primary fungal pathogens
of humans–is a temperature-induced phase transition. These fungi grow as a mold in soil at …

Histoplasmosis, caused by the dimorphic environmental fungus Histoplasma capsulatum, is
a major mycosis on the global stage. Acquisition of the fungus by mammalian hosts can be …