Identification of the Candida albicans immunome during systemic infection by mass spectrometry

Over the past two decades, mass spectrometry (MS) has ceased to be a fairly exotic technique banished from the protein scientists' mind to become a seminal tool for deciphering the information encoded in the genomes of many biological species. Clues to this shift in the modus operandi for characterizing their proteomes stem from the progressive availability of full genome sequences and well-annotated protein databases of many model (micro)organisms, the development both of soft ionization methods for large biomolecules (peptides and proteins) and of innovative instrumentation designs, and the introduction of sophisticated search algorithms able to correlate MS information with sequence databases, to name but a few. Here we integrate the typical MS-based strategy for identifying proteins of Candida albicans, an opportunistic fungal pathogen of humans, which have proved to be present during systemic infection and targeted by the immune system as a consequence of its interaction with the host (i.e., the C. albicans immunome).