Genetics and genomics of enteroarthroconidial development in Coccidioides

The human fungal pathogen Coccidioides causes disease when its infectious spores, enteroarthroconidia, are inhaled from the soil. Spore dispersal depends on the death of a unique developmental form, disjunctor cells, which flank incipient enteroarthroconidia and are unexplored molecularly. Here we used single-cell (sc) RNA-seq to catalog expression across the Coccidioides colony; with gene deletion and protein tagging, we established a role for the pyropoptosis-like cell death pathway in enteroarthroconidial development.