Biol. Pharm. Bull. 29(2) 388—391 (2006)

mortality in compromised hosts. Fukazawa et al. designed a slide agglutination scheme which uses 10 factor sera, 1, 4, 5, 6, 8, 9, 11, 13, 13b, and 34, whereby it is possible to make a rapid and accurate identification of seven medically important Candida species as a commercially available serum factor kit including the 10 factor sera (Candida Check). A structural model of Candida mannans, indicating the allocation of antigenic factors has been proposed. The cell-wall mannan parts in C. albicans are implicated to have at least some virulence functions to the host cells. It is known that the expression of cell surface antigens of C. albicans changes depending on the growth conditions, growth state, and morphology of the cells. However, little is known about the entity of the antigenic changes. With the objective to clarify the antigenicity of C. albicans cells grown in a patient’s body, we used the body temperature (high temperature, 37 °C) for the Candida cell cultivation. The results showed that the mannans prepared from all the strains of C. albicans serotypes A and B cultured at high temperature (37 °C) in yeast extract-added Sabouraud liquid medium (YSLM) composed of 0.5% (w/v) yeast extract, 1% (w/v) peptone, and 4% (w/v) glucose and in 500 mM galactoseadded yeast nitrogen base medium (YNB-Gal) lost their reactivity against the factor sera 5 and 6 in the ‘Candida Check’ and contained neither a phosphate group nor a b1,2-linked mannopyranose unit compared to that from the cells cultured under conventional conditions (27 °C) in the medium. It is known that Candida guilliermondii only rarely causes infection (fungemia) in humans. The serological behavior of the pathogenic C. guilliermondii is that the determinants of Candida antigenic factors 1, 4, and 9 have been detected on the cell surface mannan of the C. guilliermondii. The structure of the mannan of the C. guilliermondii IFO 10279 strain cultured at 27 °C has already been reported. In this study, we used various temperatures (27—37 °C) for the cultivation conditions in order to clarify the entity of the C. guilliermondii strain cells in vivo and compared the mannan structure and the antigenicity, namely, of the strain cells cultured at these temperatures in YSLM.