Introduction
Candida africana was originally isolated from patients in Africa and Germany in 1993 as atypical Candida albicans strains [1]. Later, Tietz et al. [2] proposed it as a new species. Since 2001, the new species was reported in several countries in the Middle East [3-5], Europe [6-9], East Asia [10-14], South America [10,15,16], Africa [17-19], and North America [20, 21]. In addition, C. africana was primarily isolated from the genital specimens but rarely from the skin [2], from blood cultures (in Chile [10]), and from systemic infection with renal involvement in preterm newborn babies (in the United States [21]). In Turkey, re-examining 195 vaginal C. albicans strains using hyphal wall protein 1 (HWP1) gene polymorphism proved that none of them wereCandida dubliniensis or C. africana [22]. Similarly, in Malaysia, 98 C. albicans isolates were recovered from the vagina, but none of them were found to be C. africana [23].
Candida albicans possesses a highly dynamic genome that is subjected to a wide range of changing, resulting in the evolution of new variants or strains. As an example of such evolution, C. albicansshaped the emergence of C. africana as a new species that is characterised by lower virulence and the inability to produce chlamydospores. Extensive molecular analysis of a panel of C. albicans that were recovered from vaginal swabs revealed several characteristics that distinguished those re-examined strains from theC. albicans, such as lacking N‑acetylglucosamine assimilation due to a typical polymorphism in HXK1, which compromised the utilisation of this amino acid. In addition, multi-locus sequencing analysis showed significant differences between those strains and C. albicans and demonstrated a high probability of variation, which suggests that this is an adequate type to study evolution. As a result, Chowdhary et al. [24] and Giosa et al. [25] positioned them in a separate species called C. africana .
The Candida species were extensively studied in Iraq, focusing on the clinically related ones, which were isolated from different parts of the human body [26-36]. Despite that, this work is considered the first record of this species in Iraq from the oral cavities of leukaemia patients.