Adhesins in Candida glabrata

The yeast Candida glabrata is an opportunistic human-pathogenic fungus. Adhesion to mucosal surfaces is a critical step for colonization and invasion of the host. Therefore Candida glabrata utilizes a wide variety of sticky surface-exposed cell-wall proteins, known as adhesins. I am especially interested one subfamily of adhesins, the Pwp family. From structural data I showed that the Pwps have a PA14-domain with putative glycan binding capacity. My interests are especially ligand specificity, affinity and function of the Pwp family.