Candida glabrata is a cause of life-threatening invasive infections especially in elderly and immunocompromised patients. Part of human digestive and urogenital microbiota, C. glabrata faces varying iron availability, low during infection or high in digestive and urogenital tracts. To maintain its homeostasis, C. glabrata must get iron for essential cellular processes and resist toxic iron excess.
In this study, our aim is to specifically study iron homeostasis. In particular, we want to highlight key genes, which are systematically deregulated when C. glabrata faces decreased or increased bioavailability of iron. We performed transcriptomics experiments (microarray technology) to monitor gene expression changes of C. glabrata to iron deficient and overload conditions. From this dataset, we could infer functional networks of co-expressed genes. By “functional networks”, we mean graphs in which genes (represented as nodes) are i) involved in a common cellular function and ii) are connected by edges if they react similarly during iron homeostasis. The detailed results are presented in a scientific paper (Denecker et al., 2019).
This website was created to facilitate the exploration of iron homeostasis processes in the pathogen C. glabrata. Its philosophy is to empower researchers by providing access to all our transcriptomics data and by generating easily interpretable graphical outputs. In that respect, several features were implemented to enable dynamic exploration of each functional network of co-expressed genes, enable rapid location of any genes in the network and obtain for any gene, all the available annotations available in the public databases.