{"doi":"10.3389/fcimb.2024.1484527","title":"Editorial: Rising stars in fungal pathogenesis: 2023","abstract":"In recent decades, invasive fungal infections and diseases have emerged as a significant public health treat, affecting millions of people worldwide each year with unacceptably high mortality rates (Denning, 2024). To exacerbate the situation, the repeated use of a limited range of antifungal agents in both clinical and environmental settings has led to the rise of multidrug-resistant fungal strains, making it increasingly challenging to control fungal infections (Fisher et al., 2022). This situation underscores the urgent need for a thorough understanding of fungal pathogenesis mechanisms and the identification of new targets for antifungal drug development. It also calls for a new generation of investigators to address these critical issues through their research.This research topic aims to showcase the work of \"Rising Stars\", early to mid-career researchers focused on the pathobiological characteristics of Candida albicans, Candida auris, and Cryptococcus neoformans-all recently classified as critical fungal pathogens by the World Health Organization (WHO).Dr. Kwang-Woo Jung's group at the Korean Atomic Energy Research Institute (KAERI) has characterized the pathobiological roles of the LAMMER kinase, Lkh1, in Cryptococcus neoformans (Kwon et al., 2024), a major fungal pathogen responsible for over 140,000 deaths annually due to meningoencephalitis (Denning, 2024). Since joining KAERI, Dr. Jung has focused on elucidating the DNA damage response and repair mechanisms in C. neoformans, which is notably resistant to radiation (Jung et al., 2017). In their current study (Kwon et al., 2024), they demonstrated that Lkh1 plays a crucial role in DNA damage response through both Rad53-dependent and independent pathways, and its deletion completely abolishes the virulence of this basidiomycetous pathogen, reflecting its pleiotropic pathobiological roles. Although as inducible nitric oxide synthase (iNOS) in providing protection (Goughenour et al., 2021). In this issue, her studies demonstrate how the cryptococcal virulence factor Trehalose-6-phosphate synthase (Tps1) affects host-fungal interactions across multiple layers of host defenses (Goughenour et al., 2024). Tps1 represents a promising antifungal target because this pathway is not conserved in vertebrates. The study reveals that intercepting this pathway rendered the fungus avirulent in animal models. The critical role of Tps1 in C. neoformans' evasion of pulmonary and innate defense mechanisms was demonstrated and linked to Tps1's involvement in cryptococcal capsule formation. Thus, novel therapeutics that inhibit Tps1 could reduce both fungal fitness and its resistance to host defense mechanisms.Dr. Jill R. Blankenship's group at the University of Nebraska has focused on characterizing filamentation phenotypes in clinical C. albicans strains (Brandquist et al., 2023). Dr. Blankenship has been extensively researching various pathobiological aspects of C. albicans, including serum sensitivity, biofilm formation, cell wall regulation, iron regulation, and dimorphic switching. Among these, filamentation is the most well-known virulence factor of C. albicans. In their current study (Brandquist et al., 2023), the team genotyped 20 clinical C. albicans strains collected from the Nebraska Medicine clinical laboratory using multilocus sequence typing (MLST) analysis. Interestingly, these strains proved to be as diverse as those collected from across the United States. The study's most notable finding is that all these clinical C. albicans strains exhibited robust filamentation in liquid-inducing media but not in solidinducing media, while the standard wild-type strain SC5314 filaments well in both conditions. Consequently, the authors suggest that traditional solid filamentation assays may not be reliable models for assessing the filamentation efficiency of diverse C. albicans isolates and may not be suitable for drug development.Emerging Diseases (MICROS) Research Group, has evaluat","journal":"Frontiers in Cellular and Infection Microbiology","year":2024,"id":504073,"datarank":0.0,"base_score":0.0,"endowment":0.0,"self_citation_contribution":0.0,"citation_network_contribution":0.0,"self_endowment_contribution":0.0,"citer_contribution":0.0,"corpus_percentile":null,"corpus_rank":null,"citation_count":0,"citer_count":0,"citers_with_citation_signal":0,"citers_with_endowment":0,"datacite_reuse_total":0,"is_dataset":false,"is_dataset_confidence":0.9497,"is_data_producer":false,"deposit_databanks":null,"is_oa":true,"file_count":0,"downloads":0,"has_version_chain":false,"published_date":"2024-01-01","fair_score":null,"fair_percentile":null,"algorithm_id":"datarank_citation_only_1hop_v6","ranking_scope":"data_only","authors":[{"id":1354247,"name":"Adriana Marcela Celis Ramírez","orcid":"0000-0003-3057-1966","position":1,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":464146,"name":"Michal A. Olszewski","orcid":"0000-0001-7474-0843","position":2,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":322518,"name":"Yong‐Sun Bahn","orcid":"0000-0001-9573-5752","position":3,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":394997,"name":"Brian L. Wickes","orcid":"0000-0001-5909-5815","position":0,"is_corresponding":true}],"reference_count":7,"raw_metadata":{"citation_network_status":"fetched"},"created_at":"2026-07-19T02:10:35.597333Z","pmid":"39403209","pmcid":null,"fwci":null,"citation_percentile":null,"influential_citations":0,"oa_status":null,"license":null,"views":0,"total_file_size_bytes":0,"version_count":0,"fair_f":null,"fair_a":null,"fair_i":null,"fair_r":null,"fair_zscore":null,"fair_rationale":null,"fair_model":null,"fair_agent_version":null,"fair_fulltext_source":null,"fair_has_llm":null,"fair_computed_at":null,"clinical_trials":[],"software_tools":[],"db_accessions":[],"linked_datasets":[],"topics":[]}