Pan-Genome Analysis Reveals The Molecular Targets of Identification and Virulence Detection in Mucoralean Fungi (preprint)

ABSTRACT

Mucoralean fungi offer various pathogens to cause mucormycosis, especially in immunodeficient patients. Over the past decades, both the morbidity and mortality of mucormycosis have increased rapidly, particularly in developing countries. Nowadays, mucormycosis more often happens in India for the COVID-19 pandemic and its backward diagnostic techniques. Our epidemiologic outcomes show several identifications of Mucoralean fungi are limited to genus, while Rhizopus species, Mucor species and Lichtheimia species have high proportions. To find more molecular targets to make rapid and accurate identifications of Mucorales genus and species, Pan-genome analysis and Phylogenetic tree are conducted with four Mucorales isolates we sequenced and 43 fungi from NCBI. A few Mucorales-specific genes have been found such as STE/STE20 protein kinase, GH36 and sel1 repeat protein. Mucorales genus-specific genes are also found in Lichtheimia species and Cunninghamella species, which covered cellular structure, biochemistry metabolism, molecular processing, and signal transduction. Reported proteins related to the virulence of Mucorales species were run with Orthofinder and 112092, cotH3, gcn4 and igp1 have shown the potential to be the direct identification as well as the virulence detection of Mucorales species. The molecular biological techniques need to be promoted, for which our study provide hypothesis and feasibility analysis.