Isolation of triazole-resistant Aspergillus fumigatus harbouring cyp51A mutations from five patients with invasive pulmonary aspergillosis in Yunnan, China

ABSTRACT

Invasive aspergillosis (IA) is the most severe type of Aspergillus infection. Yunnan has developed agriculture, and the proportion of triazole-resistant A. fumigatus induced by triazole fungicides is much higher than that in other regions of China. Inhalation of triazole-resistant A. fumigatus is one of the main factors inducing IA. We gathered five strains of A. fumigatus from the sputum or bronchoalveolar lavage fluid (BALF) of patients with IA in Yunnan. Subsequent testing showed that all of these strains were resistant to triazoles and harboured mutations in the tandem repeat sequence of the cyp51A promoter region, suggesting that they may be triazole-resistant A. fumigatus present in the environment.

KEYWORDS:

• Invasive aspergillosis
• Aspergillus fumigatus
• triazole-resistant
• cyp51A mutation

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

The cyp51A gene sequences of BMU15486, BMU15487, BMU15488, BMU15489, and BMU15490 have been submitted to the GenBank database and the assigned accession numbers are OR906202–OR906206, respectively.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Key Research and Development Program of China (2021YFC2300400), National Natural Science Foundation of China (81971912), Beijing Municipal Natural Science Foundation (7232178), National Key Research and Development Program of China (2021YFC2302005), and the Science and Technology Project of Yunnan Province (202101AY070001-246).