Vikas Yadav

Bacterial metabolites induce cell wall remodeling, antifungal resistance, and immune recognition of commensal fungi The fungus Candida albicans commensally colonizes mucosal surfaces in healthy individuals but can cause both superficial mucosal and life-threatening disseminated infections. The balance between comme...

Today is a good day to read our preprint about Candida albicans interactions with its neighbors! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... led by the amazing Faith Davis and a fantastic team of collaborators @kylaost.bsky.social @shannonrighi.bsky.social @balunaslab.bsky.social @tuowang.bsky.social

A big thanks to your efforts for freezing those isolates and support for the past few months.

The story behind the science…that began like 30 years ago! A reminder to undergrad researchers to keep good notebooks (and freezer logs)! :)

Elated to share that this story about an unexpected and important finding is now published @pnas.org
www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...
These findings have laid a strong foundation for us to now identify proteins critical for cell proliferation at 37°C in a human fungal pathogen.

Vikas Yadav @vikasyadavsci.bsky.social closes out the first session by exploring how Calcineurin drives thermal adaptation in Cryptococcus

Calcineurin controls the cytokinesis machinery during thermal stress in Cryptococcus deneoformans https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.02.17.638697v1

Finally, this marks a significant advancement and description of a protein complex that is essential for high-temperature growth in a critical human fungal pathogen.

Using genetics, we then found that they indeed are interdependent on each other, and alphafold modeling showed a nice complex formation as well.

As we looked at these in more depth, things started to become clearer, and we found that they were all involved in cell division. A deep dive into the literature revealed they were all part of a single complex that regulates cytokinesis in Saccharomyces cerevisiae. Huge thanks for all this work!

I then obtained >50 additional isolates and sequenced all of them. Interestingly enough, We kept on finding dominant amino acid change mutations in three proteins that did not seem related to each other in any way at first glance.

This story in some way started >30 years ago when Joe and Audrey Odom, an undergrad at that time in the lab, isolated some mutants that were resistant to calcineurin inhibitors. A dozen of these were frozen and forgotten until about a couple of years ago when I revived and sequenced them.

Excited to share my latest paper on the role of calcineurin in cytokinesis in a critical human pathogen. It started with a genetic screen to identify mutants that can provide resistance to calcineurin inhibitors, which took us to a very unexpected place. A short 🧵
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

A postdoc position in fungal pathogenesis and drug resistance mechanisms is available at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences in the labs of Bill Steinbach and Praveen Juvvadi. Details here:

The Medical Mycology Trainee Seminar Series is back! Our next seminar is November 14th at 4 pm GMT (5 pm Central Europe Time, 11 am Eastern Standard, 8 am Pacific Standard, 12 am in China). 1/12

Comparative genomics of the closely related fungal genera Cryptococcus and Kwoniella reveals karyotype dynamics and suggests evolutionary mechanisms of pathogenesis Understanding the different evolution of closely related pathogenic and non-pathogenic fungi can help decipher the mechanisms of pathogenesis. In this study, comparative genomics is used to analyze th...

A beautiful study that highlights SO MUCH about genome structure evolution with implications on the evolution of pathogenicity. Amazing piece of work led by
Marco and Marcia in the Heitman lab in collaboration with Christina Cuomo's team.
It comes with the most beautiful figures.
t.co/XQj3KLykmv

Our new paper describing an unexpected role of #calcineurin signaling in #RNAi-mediated small RNA production is now out in GENETICS - implying a way to quickly adapt to external conditions by altering gene expression levels. #Fungi #Cryptococcus
academic.oup.com/genetics/adv...

Interested in chromosome number or centromere structure evolution? Giant chromosomes and mini-chromosomes? Pathogenicity-specific horizontal gene transfer? Find all these and more in this massive piece of work led by Marco and Marcia (Heitman lab) with Christina Cuomo
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...