MOLECULAR-CLONING AND CHARACTERIZATION OF A CANDIDA-ALBICANS GENE (EFB1) CODING FOR THE ELONGATION-FACTOR EF-1-BETA

A Candida albicans gene homologous to Saccharomyces cerevisiae elongat ion factor 1 beta was isolated by screening a genomic DNA library usin g a C. albicans cDNA as a probe. This cDNA was previously obtained by immunoscreening of an expression library with polyclonal antibodies ra ised against candidal cell wall components. Sequence analysis of the c DNA and the whole C. albicans gene (EMBL accession number X96517) reve aled an intron-interrupted open reading frame of 639 base pairs that e ncodes a 213 amino acid protein. Exon sequences are highly homologous (74%) to S. cerevisiae EPB1, whereas intron sequence is less conserved (34% identity), and the predicted amino acid sequence shares about 73 % identity.