Editorial: Candida glabrata, the other yeast pathogen.

The ascomycete yeast Candida glabrata ranks second, in many studies, after Candida albicans as the most frequent yeast pathogen of humans, responsible for many types of opportunistic infections, and most notable for the high mortality it provokes in immuno-compromised patients. It was first described as Cryptococcus glabratus , isolated from human faeces in 1917 (Anderson, 1917). Major breakthroughs in understanding the phylogeny and population structure of yeast and other fungal pathogens, and indeed, many domains of the tree of life, were brought about by recent progress in sequencing technologies. Since Saccharomyces cerevisiae opened the way by becoming the first eukaryote to have its genome entirely sequenced, by an international consortium (Goffeau et al . 1996), many full genomes have been released, and yeast species account for a good number among eukaryotes, owing to the compactness and small size of their genomes. The genome of C. glabrata was published in 2004 (Dujon et al . 2004), as part of the Genolevures effort (http://gryc.inra.fr/). Genomics confirmed previous gene analyses (Kurtzman and Robnett, 1998), that showed that C. glabrata is much more closely phylogenetically related to S. cerevisiae than to C. albicans , descending from the same ancestor that underwent a whole genome duplication event. It remains one of the few pathogens from this branch of the phylogenetic tree of the Saccharomycetaceae . This is another demonstration of the fact that genus names are not monophyletic in yeasts, and do not represent true lineages. Since then, two new pathogens have been described, Candida nivariensis (Alcoba-Florez et al. 2005) and Candida bracarensis ( Correia et al . 2006), that are part of the Nakaseomyces , the clade described by C. Kurtzman to contain C. glabrata , and up to that point, only three additional environmental species, Nakaseomyces ( Kluyveromyces ) bacillisporus , Nakaseomyces ( Kluyveromyces ) delphensis, Nakaseomyces ( Candida ) castellii , … [↵][1]* Corresponding author: E-mail: cecile.fairhead{at}u-psud.fr [1]: #xref-corresp-1-1