CARE-2 fingerprinting of Candida albicans isolates

The emergence of resistance to antifungal drugs in medically important fungi has become a significant problem in recent years. Probably the best-studied example is the development of resistance to the widely used antifungal agent fluconazole in the yeast Candida albicans. The availability of matched series of clinical isolates representing the same strain in which drug resistance developed over time has provided opportunities to detect cellular alterations that are correlated with drug resistance. We describe a method for DNA fingerprinting of C. albicans isolates based on Southern hybridization of genomic DNA with the C. albicans-specific repetitive DNA element CARE-2. Molecular typing with CARE-2 permits highly reliable discrimination of unrelated strains to ascertain that serial isolates recovered from individual patients indeed represent the same C. albicans strain.