Journal article
Chytridiomycosis causes catastrophic organism-wide metabolic dysregulation including profound failure of cellular energy pathways
LF Grogan, LF Skerratt, L Berger, SD Cashins, RD Trengove, JPA Gummer
Scientific Reports | NATURE PORTFOLIO | Published : 2018
Abstract
Chytridiomycosis is among several recently emerged fungal diseases of wildlife that have caused decline or extinction of naïve populations. Despite recent advances in understanding pathogenesis, host response to infection remains poorly understood. Here we modelled a total of 162 metabolites across skin and liver tissues of 61 frogs from four populations (three long-exposed and one naïve to the fungus) of the Australian alpine tree frog (Litoria verreauxii alpina) throughout a longitudinal exposure experiment involving both infected and negative control individuals. We found that chytridiomycosis dramatically altered the organism-wide metabolism of clinically diseased frogs. Chytridiomycosis..
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Awarded by U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service
Funding Acknowledgements
We thank P. Harlow, M. McFadden, D. Hunter and B. Scheele for assistance with logistics for the clinical experiment and species' insights. We also thank C. Rawlinson and H. Wong for valuable technical assistance towards GC-MS analyses. This work was jointly funded by the US Fish and Wildlife Service - Wildlife Without Borders program and the IUCN Amphibian Specialist Group Seed grants program. Metabolomics Australia is a Bioplatforms Australia (BPA) funded initiative. JPAG was supported through BPA. LG and LB were supported by Australian Research Council grants FT100100375, DP120100811 and LP110200240. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. Additional Supporting Information may be found online for this article. Grogan et al. describes the underlying study and preparatory methodology in detail and presents the raw metabolomics data. Also see: Grogan, L. F. et al. (2018) Dryad Digital Repository (https://datadryad.org//resource/doi:10.5061/dryad.t1p7c), and Gummer, J. & Grogan, L. (2018) MetaboLights MTBLS457 (https://www.ebi.ac.uk/metabolights/MTBLS457).