Murine innate defence against A. fumigatus is sufficient to prevent infection, even in heavily infected animals, and immunosuppression is required to establish

infection (Lewis & Wiederhold, 2005). In the McDonagh study, both macrophage and neutrophil cell populations were chemotherapeutically targeted, using hydrocortisone acetate and cyclophosphamide, respectively, the former drug administered in a single dose 1 day before infection and the latter periodically administered throughout the duration of the experiment (Lewis & Wiederhold, 2005). Phagocytosis by macrophages harvested from hydrocortisone-treated A. fumigatus-infected mice is known to occur, but fungal killing is compromised (Philippe et al., 2003). It is likely, therefore, that host Verteporfin purchase cells, predominantly macrophages, are encountered in the alveolar and bronchial spaces (Fig. 2b and c), and encountered macrophages are compromised in their ability to kill A. fumigatus spores. Conversely, the encapsulated facultative intracellular pathogen C. neoformans can establish infection in immunocompetent mice. Moreover, the interaction between macrophages and C. neoformans is critical for containing the dissemination of this pathogenic yeast, whose success is subverted by C. neoformans-derived

factors. Cryptococcus neoformans is capable of replication within the macrophage phagolysosome, a process that ultimately leads to host cell lysis or phagosome extrusion (Tucker & Casadevall, 2002; Alvarez & Casadevall, find more 2006; Ma et al., 2006). As in vitro studies indicate that the time taken to extrude a C. neoformans-containing phagolysosome can be as little as 2 h (Tucker & Casadevall,

2002; Alvarez & Casadevall, 2006; Ma et al., 2006), it is likely that multiple macrophage encounters occurred during the experimental time frame, and, contrary Rho to the A. fumigatus infection model, noninfected macrophages were completely proficient with respect to killing ability. Carbon metabolism was, to varying degrees, commonly implicated among all of the mammalian pathogen datasets with acetyl-CoA synthetase and isocitrate dehydrogenase featuring in all four upregulated genesets. Combined with extant data on fungal carbon-metabolizing gene products and virulence, considerable insight can be gained from our comparative analysis. Firstly, the differential roles of glyoxylate cycle enzymes in virulence, which has been studied in multiple mammalian fungal pathogens, could not have been predicted from our comparative transcriptomic analysis. Glyoxylate cycle gene products are required for full virulence in C. albicans (Lorenz & Fink, 2001; Wang et al., 2003; Barelle et al., 2006) and M. grisea (Wang et al., 2003), but not in A. fumigatus (Schobel et al., 2007; Olivas et al., 2008) or C. neoformans (Rude et al., 2002). Indeed, based on our analysis, one might have predicted the necessity of glyoxylate pathway functionality in C. neoformans and A. fumigatus and nonrequirement in M. grisea (Table 2).