CANDIDA-ZEYLANOIDES - ANOTHER OPPORTUNISTIC YEAST

A patient with a long history of scleroderma and gastrointestinal malabsorption requiring total parenteral nutrition was admitted with Candida zeylanoides fungemia. The yeast responded to therapy, but on two subsequent admissions for episodes of fever the blood cultures yielded the same yeast. The identity of the Candida species was established biochemically by both the API (Analytab) and Vitek system approaches. C. zeylanoides ATCC 20356 and ATCC 7351 served as cotrols for these analyses and for antifungal susceptibility studies and restriction endonuclease analyses of chromosomal DNA. These investigations indicated that representative isolates of the yeasts from the three episodes were identical and differed in several respects from the ATCC strains, which did not share many of the characteristic bands with the DNA restriction fragment analysis. C. zeylanoides variants capable of tolerating 35-degrees-C can complicate the recovery of patients, especially individuals compromised by their underlying disease.