ISSN: 0973-7510

E-ISSN: 2581-690X

Review Article | Open Access
Rahul Dev
Department of Zoology, Acharya Narendra Dev College, University of Delhi, Govindpuri, Kalkaji, New Delhi – 110 019, India.
J Pure Appl Microbiol. 2021;15(1):20-28 | Article Number: 6067
https://doi.org/10.22207/JPAM.15.1.42 | © The Author(s). 2021
Received: 05/03/2020 | Accepted: 28/10/2020 | Published: 27/02/2021
Abstract

Fungal infections have predominantly increased worldwide that leads to morbidity and mortality in severe cases. Invasive candidiasis and other pathogenic fungal infections are a major problem in immunocompromised individuals and post-operative patients. Increasing resistance to existing antifungal drugs calls for the identification of novel antifungal drug targets for chemotherapeutic interventions. This demand for identification and characterization of novel drug targets leads to the development of effective antifungal therapy against drug resistant fungi. Heat shock proteins (HSPs) are important for various biological processes like protein folding, posttranslational modifications, transcription, translation, and protein aggregation. HSPs are involved in maintaining homeostasis of the cell. A subgroup of HSPs is small heat shock proteins (sHSPs), which functions as cellular chaperones. They are having a significant role in the many cellular functions like development, cytoskeletal organization, apoptosis, membrane lipid polymorphism, differentiation, autophagy, in infection recognition and are major players in various stresses like osmotic stress, pH stress, etc. Studies have shown that fungal cells express increased levels of sHSPs upon antifungal drug induced stress responses. Here we review the important role of small heat shock proteins (sHSPs) in fungal diseases and their potential as antifungal targets.

Keywords

Candida albicans, Drug resistance, Small heat shock proteins, Antifungals

Article Metrics

Article View: 753

Share This Article

© The Author(s) 2021. Open Access. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License which permits unrestricted use, sharing, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made.