CLONING OF A CDNA FRAGMENT ENCODING PART OF THE PROTEIN MOIETY OF THE58-KDA FIBRINOGEN-BINDING MANNOPROTEIN OF CANDIDA-ALBICANS

Immunoscreening of a Candida albicans expression library with antibodi es against the 58 kDa fibrinogen-binding mannoprotein (mp58) of the fu ngus resulted in the isolation of clones encoding the protein moiety o f this molecule. Sequence of the 0.9 kb cDNA of one of the clones sele cted for further analysis, revealed an open reading frame coding for 2 92 amino acids, which displays sequence similarity to proteins belongi ng to a family of immunodominant antigens of Aspergillus spp. The gene corresponding to this cDNA was named FBP1 (fibrinogen-binding protein ). These results represent the first report on the identification of C . albicans genes encoding surface receptors for host proteins.