Fig. 2: Cellular morphology and cell wall architecture of C. albicans strains.

A C. albicans strains WT, CNA7, CNA25, CNA24, and CNA298 were grown in YPD liquid media + 10% FBS for 1 h at 37 °C and morphology was captured under the Leica DM 500 microscope with scale bar-10µm (i). The length of germ tubes was measured using ImageJ software and represented as mean ± SEM in dot plots in Graph Pad Prism 8.0. The statistical significance of knockout strains in comparison to WT was determined by one-way ANOVA (ii). B Ultrastructure of the WT, CNA7, and CNA24 were determined using TEM. Images depicting a group of cells, scale bar = 2 μm (2500X) (i), an individual cell, scale bar = 1 μm (5000X) (ii), and the thickness of individual cell wall, scale bar = 500 nm (10000X) (iii) are given. The arrow marks the zoom-in image of the cell to be examined. The box indicates the zoom-in image of the fraction of the cell wall to calculate the actual thickness. The graph was plotted using mean ± SEM in Graph Pad Prism 8.0 software. Statistical significance of knockout strains in comparison to WT was determined by using by two-way ANOVA with Dunnett’s multiple comparisons test. C The chitin, β-glucan, and mannan contents of the cell wall were estimated by staining with CFW, aniline blue, and Con A, respectively, using flow cytometry. The graph was plotted using mean fluorescence intensity and statistical significance was determined between WT and mutant strains using a two-way ANOVA test with Tukey’s multiple comparisons test. The results are presented as mean ± SEM from triplicate data using Graph Pad Prism 8.0 software. Asterisks indicate the statistically significant differences (*p ≤ 0.05, **p ≤ 0.01, ***p ≤ 0.001, and ****p ≤ 0.0001).