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When and why an essential popular mineral—calcium—is an effective antifungal adjuvant against the human pathogen?

In eukaryotes, calcium not only is an essential mineral nutrient but also serves as an intracellular second messenger that is necessary for many physiological processes. Here, we show that exogenous calcium is toxic when fungal cells lack functional calcineurin, a calcium-dependent protein phosphatase that acts as the central regulator of the calcium signaling pathway. By monitoring intracellular calcium, particularly by tracking vacuolar calcium dynamics in living cells through a novel procedure using modified aequorin, we found that calcineurin dysfunction perturbed calcium homeostasis in intracellular compartments including the cytosol, mitochondria, and vacuole, leading to drastic autophagy global organelle fragmentation, and even lastly resulting in cell death upon an extracellular calcium stimulus. Notably, the defective phenotypes seen with calcineurin mutants can be significantly suppressed by alleviating a cytosolic calcium overload or increasing vacuolar calcium storage capacity, suggesting toxicity of exogenous calcium to calcineurin mutants is tightly associated with abnormal cytosolic calcium accumulation and vacuolar calcium storage capacity deficiency. Our findings provide insights into how calcineurin regulates intracellular calcium homeostasis for cell survival and may have important implications for antifungal therapy and clinical drug administration.