日時：	2026年4月27日（月）14：00～15：00
場所：	医生物学研究所　医生研３号館３階セミナー室（312-314室） Seminar room (312-314), 3rd Floor, Bldg. No.3
演者：	Catherine Villard, Ph.D. CNRS Research Director Invited professor, Tokyo College - Japan Deputy Director of the Laboratoire Interdisciplinaire des Energies de Demain
演題：	Candida albicans's hyphae pathfinding as a proxy for virulence

講演要旨

How living organisms utilize physical mechanisms to sense their environments and make informed decisions is an open question at the interface of biology and physics. In fungi that produce long, micro-sized multi-cellular filaments, or hyphae, decisions are taken by growing tip cells and later imprinted onto the rest of the filament. In this talk, I will present our recent work on the pathfinding modalities of hyphae produced by the opportunistic fungal pathogen Candida albicans, whose ability to cross intestinal epithelial layers is associated to severe systemic infections in humans. I will first describe how C. albicans hyphae, when confined to free surfaces into dedicated microfluidic channels, explore their surrounding by turning their tip cells into helical sensory springs. Next, when challenging C. albicans hyphae from strains of various virulence potential inside micro-mazes, we find that the highest virulence is associated with a combination of short range exploration and long range directionality. Overall, our ‘fungifluidic’ approach, by enabling hyphal navigation into controlled microenvironments, may provide novel descriptors of the pathogenic potential of C. albicans strains.

20260427_Catherine_Kyoto

Host: Hirofumi Shintaku, shintaku[@]infront.kyoto-u.ac.jp