Jessica Kissinger

Research

How do eukaryotic and organellar genome sequences evolve? Our lab is interested in parasite genomics and the biology of genome evolution. The nuclear and organellar genome sequences of parasitic eukaryotes are often highly-reduced, devoid of recognizable mobile elements and riddled with intracellular and lateral gene transfers. Our approach is to apply molecular, computational and phylogenetic tools to the analysis of complete parasite genome sequences. Projects include the development of tools for data integration, data mining, comparative genomics and the systems biology of host-pathogen interactions. Kissinger is a member of the NIH/NIAID Bioinformatic Resource Center, VEuPathDB.org leadership team. Research focuses on the apicomplexan protist pathogens, Toxoplasma gondii and several species of Cryptosporidium and Plasmodium. Researchers in our group work at the bench, the computer, or both.

Grant Support

• NIH 75N93019R00028, “Center for Influenza Disease and Emergence Research (CIDER)” (2021-2028) Role: Co-I
• NIH R01AI148667, “Capturing the genomic variation present in Cryptosporidium and cryptosporidiosis” (2020-2024) Role: Joint-PI with Travis Glenn
• “Ensuring Access and Appropriate/Effective Use of Clinical & Epidemiological Datasets for Enteric Pathogens,” Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (2020-2022), Role: Co-I
• NIH R21AI144779-01A1, “Detailed analysis of Cryptosporidium non-coding gene expression” (2020 – 2022), Role: PI
• “Bioinformatics resources for kinetoplastid organisms and their hosts”, Wellcome Trust (2020-2024), Role: Co-applicant with Andy Jones & David Roos
• “THIRM, Thwarting Influenza with RNA-powered Modulators” DARPA (2019-2023), Role: Local PI
• “Integrated Informatics Resources for Eukaryotic Microbial Pathogens and Invertebrate Vectors of Disease” i.e. VEuPathDB.org, NIH/NIAID (2019-2024), Role: Co-I
• FungiDB: An integrated bioinformatics resource for fungi and oomycetes”, Wellcome Trust (2018-2023), Role: Co-Applicant with Andy Jones & David Roos

Selected Publications

(*= Graduate student; # = Undergraduate student)

• Mariko S. Peterson, Chester J. Joyner, Stacey A. Lapp, Jessica A. Brady, Jennifer S. Wood, Monica Cabrera-Mora, Celia L. Saney, Luis L. Fonseca, Jianlin Jiang, Stephanie R. Soderberg, Mustafa V. Nural, Jay Humphrey, Allison Hankus, Deepa Machiah, Ebru Karpuzoglu, Jeremy D. DeBarry, MaHPIC Consortium, Rabindra Tirouvanziam, Jessica C. Kissinger, Alberto Moreno, Sanjeev Gumber, Eberhard O. Voit, Juan B. Gutierrez, Regina Joice Cordy and Mary R. Galinski. 2022. Plasmodium knowlesi cytoadhesion involves SICA variant proteins. Frontiers in Cellular and Infection Microbiology. doi: 10.3389/fcimb.2022.888496
• Yiran Li*, Rodrigo P. Baptista, Xiaohan Mei and Jessica C. Kissinger. 2022. Small and intermediate size structural RNAs in the unicellular parasite Cryptosporidium parvum as revealed by sRNA-Seq and comparative genomics. Microbial Genomics.  doi: 10.1099/mgen.0.000821.
• Rodrigo P. Baptista, Yiran Li*, Adam Sateriale, Mandy J. Sanders, Karen L. Brooks, Alan Tracey, Brendan R. E. Ansell, Aaron R. Jex, Garrett W. Cooper, Ethan D. Smith, Rui Xiao, Jennifer E. Dumaine, Matthew Berriman, Boris Striepen, James A. Cotton and Jessica C. Kissinger. 2022. Long-read assembly and comparative and evidence-based reanalysis of Cryptosporidium genome sequences reveal new biological insights. Genome Res. 2022  doi: 10.1101/gr.275325.121.
• Amos B, Aurrecoechea C, Barba M, Barreto A, Basenko EY, Bażant W, Belnap R, Blevins AS, Böhme U, Brestelli J, Brunk BP, Caddick M, Callan D, Campbell L, Christensen MB, Christophides GK, Crouch K, Davis K, DeBarry J, Doherty R, Duan Y, Dunn M, Falke D, Fisher S, Flicek P, Fox B, Gajria B, Giraldo-Calderón GI, Harb OS, Harper E, Hertz-Fowler C, Hickman MJ, Howington C, Hu S, Humphrey J, Iodice J, Jones A, Judkins J, Kelly SA, Kissinger JC, Kwon DK, Lamoureux K, Lawson D, Li W, Lies K, Lodha D, Long J, MacCallum RM, Maslen G, McDowell MA, Nabrzyski J, Roos DS, Rund SSC, Schulman SW, Shanmugasundram A, Sitnik V, Spruill D, Starns D, Stoeckert CJ, Tomko SS, Wang H, Warrenfeltz S, Wieck R, Wilkinson PA, Xu L, Zheng J. 2022. VEuPathDB: the eukaryotic pathogen, vector and host bioinformatics resource center.  Nucleic Acids Res. 2022 Jan 7;50(D1):D898-D911. doi: 10.1093/nar/gkab929.
• Rodrigo P. Baptista, Garrett W. Cooper^# and Jessica C. Kissinger. 2021.  Challenges for Cryptosporidium population studies. Genes 2021, 12:894  doi.org/10.3390/genes12060894
• Sivaranjani Namasivayam*, Wenyuan Xiao*, Rodrigo P. Baptista, Erica M. Hall^#,  Joseph S. Doggett, Karin Troell and Jessica C. Kissinger. 2021. A novel fragmented mitochondrial genome in the protist pathogen Toxoplasma gondii and related tissue coccidia. Genome Research, doi:10.1101/gr.266403.120
• Peterson MS, Joyner CJ, Brady JA, Wood JS, Cabrera-Mora M, Saney CL, Fonseca LL, Cheng WT, Jiang J, Lapp SA, Soderberg SR, Nural MV, Humphrey JC, Hankus A, Machiah D, Karpuzoglu E, DeBarry JD; MaHPIC-Consortium, Tirouvanziam R, Kissinger JC, Moreno A, Gumber S, Voit EO, Gutiérrez JB, Cordy RJ, Galinski MR. 2021. Clinical recovery of Macaca fascicularis infected with Plasmodium knowlesi. Malar J. 2021 Dec 30;20(1):486. doi: 10.1186/s12936-021-03925-6.
• Wang W., Peng D., Baptista R.P., Li Y.*, Mining T., Kissinger J.C. and Tarleton R.L. 2021. Gene family expansion and diversification in Trypanosoma cruzi 2021. PLoS Pathogens doi.org/10.1371/journal.ppat.1009254
• Li, Yiran*, Baptista R.P., A. Sateriale, B. Striepen and Kissinger J.C. 2020. Long Non-coding RNAs During Cryptosporidium parvum Development as Revealed by Stranded RNA-Seq. Front. Cell. Infect. Microbiol. 10:608298. doi: 10.3389/fcimb.2020.608298
• J.H. Butler, Baptista R.P, Valenciano, A.L., Conrad, M. R.M., Kissinger J.C., Tumwebaze, P.K., Rosenthal P.J., Cooper R.A., Yue J., Zhou B. and Cassera M.B. 2020. “Mutations in Plasmodium falciparum Pro-drug Activation and Resistance Esterase Mediate Resistance to a Sub-class of Sesquiterpene Dimer Antimalarial Natural Products” ACS Infect Dis. Nov 13;6(11):2994-3003 doi: 10.1021/acsinfecdis.0c00487
• Yiran Li*, R.P. Baptista and J.C. Kissinger.  2020. Non-coding RNAs in the Apicomplexa: an update.  Trends in Parasitology. Oct;36(10):835-849 DOI:10.1016/j.pt.2020.07.006.
• Jeremy D. DeBarry, Jessica C. Kissinger, Mustafa V. Nural, Suman B. Pakala, Jay C. Humphrey, Esmeralda V. S. Meyer, Regina Joice Cordy, Monica Cabrera-Mora, Elizabeth D. Trippe, Jacob B. Aguilar, Ebru Karpuzoglu, Yi H. Yan, Jessica A. Brady, Allison N. Hankus, Nicolas Lackman, Alan R. Gingle, Vishal Nayak, Alberto Moreno, Chester J. Joyner,Juan B. Gutierrez, Mary R. Galinski, and the MaHPIC Consortium. 2020. Guidelines for Supporting a Systems Biology Cyberinfrastructure. 19:24 pp-1-12 DOI:10.5334/dsj-2020-024
• Loic Favennec, Giovanni Widmer, David Carmena, Martin Kvac, Rachel M. Chalmers, Jessica C. Kissinger, Lihua Xiao, Adam Sateriale, Borist Striepen, Fabrice Laurent, Sonia Lacroix Lamande and Gilles Gargala. 2020. Update on Cryptosporidium spp.: Highlights from the Seventh International Giardia and Cryptosporidium Conference. Parasite Vol. 27(14) DOI: 10.1051/parasite/2020011
• Warrenfeltz S, Kissinger JC; EuPathDB Team. Accessing Cryptosporidium Omic and Isolate Data via CryptoDB.org. Methods Mol Biol. 2020;2052:139-192. doi: 10.1007/978-1-4939-9748-0_10. PubMed PMID: 31452162.
• Emmanuel Ruhamyankaka, Brian P. Brunk, Grant Dorsey, Omar S. Harb, Danica A. Helb, John Judkins, Jessica C. Kissinger, Brianna Lindsay, David S. Roos, Christian J. Stoeckert, Jie Zheng, Sheena Shah Tomko. ClinEpiDB: an open-access clinical epidemiology database resource encouraging online exploration of complex studies. 2019 Open Res 2019, 3:1661 doi.org/10.12688/gatesopenres.13087.1
• Joyner CJ, Brito CFA, Saney CL, Joice Cordy R, Smith ML, Lapp SA, Cabrera-Mora M, Kyu S, Lackman N, Nural MV, DeBarry JD; MaHPIC Consortium, Kissinger JC, Styczynski MP, Lee FE, Lamb TJ, Galinski MR. Humoral immunity prevents clinical malaria during Plasmodium relapses without eliminating gametocytes. PLoS Pathog. 2019 Sep 19;15(9):e1007974. doi: 10.1371/journal.ppat.1007974. PubMed PMID: 31536608.
• Baptista RP, Kissinger JC. Is reliance on an inaccurate genome sequence sabotaging your experiments? PLoS Pathog. 2019 Sep 12;15(9):e1007901. doi: 10.1371/journal.ppat.1007901. PubMed PMID: 31513692
• Adam Sateriale, Jan Slapeta, Rodrigo Baptista, Julie B. Engiles, Jodi A. Gullicksrud, Gillian T. Herbert, Carrie F. Brooks, Emily M. Kugler, Jessica C. Kissinger, Christopher A. Hunter, and Boris Striepen. A Genetically Tractable, Natural Mouse Model of Cryptosporidiosis Offers Insights into Host Protective Immunity, Cell Host & Microbe 2019, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chom.2019.05.006
• Cordy RJ, Patrapuvich R, Lili LN, Cabrera-Mora M, Chien J-T, Tharp GK, Khadka M, Meyer EVS, Lapp SA, Joyner CJ, Garcia A, Banton S, Tran V, Luvira V, Rungin S, Saeseu T, Rachaphaew N, Pakala S, DeBarry JD, MaHPIC Consortium, Kissinger JC, Ortland EA, Bosinger SE, Barnwell JW, Jones DP, Uppal K, Li S, Sattabongkot J, Moreno A, Galinski MR.  2019; Distinct amino acid and lipid perturbations characterize acute versus chronic malaria JCI Insight 2019;4(9):e125156    doi.org/10.1172/jci.insight.125156
• Jessica C. Kissinger. Evolution of Cryptosporidium. News & Views. (2019) Nature Microbiology.  https://doi.org/10.1038/s41564-019-0438-1
• Warrenfeltz S, Basenko EY, Crouch K, Harb OS, Kissinger JC, Roos DS, Shanmugasundram A,  and Silva-Franco F. EuPathDB: The Eukaryotic Pathogen Genomics Database Resource. 2018. Methods Mol Biol. 2018;1757:69-113. doi: 10.1007/978-1-4939-7737-6_5.
• Evelina Y. Basenko, Jane A. Pulman, Achchuthan Shanmugasundram, Omar S. Harb, Kathryn Crouch, David Starns, Susanne Warrenfeltz, Cristina Aurrecoechea, Christian J. Stoeckert Jr., Jessica C. Kissinger, David S. Roos, Christiane Hertz-Fowler. FungiDB: An integrated bioinformatic resource for fungi and oomycetes. 2018. Journal of Fungi 2018, 4(1), 39; doi:10.3390/jof4010039
• Rodrigo P. Baptista, João Luis R. Cunha, Jeremy DeBarry, Egler Chiari, Jessica C. Kissinger, Daniella C. Bartholomeu and Andréa M. Macedo. Assembly of highly-repetitive genomes using short reads: The genome of DTU III Trypanosoma cruzi strain 231, 2018 Microb Genom. 2018 Feb 14. doi: 10.1099/mgen.0.000156
• Jessica C. Kissinger, Karen E. Hermetz, Keith M. Woodsd, Steve J. Upton. Enrichment of Cryptosporidium parvum from in vitro culture as measured by total RNA and subsequent sequence analysis. 2018 Mol Biochem Parasitol.  doi: 10.1016/j.molbiopara.2017.12.004115
• Animesh Dhara, Rodrigo de Paula Baptista, Jessica C. Kissinger, E. Charles Snow and Anthony P. Sinai, Ablation of an OTU-family deubiquitinase exposed the underlying regulation governing the plasticity of cell cycle progression in Toxoplasma gondii 2017 mBio 8:e01846-17
• John Brestelli, Francislon S. Oliveira, Shon Cade, Jie Zheng, John Iodice, Steve Fischer, Cristina Aurrecoechea, Jessica C. Kissinger, Brian P. Brunk, Christian J. Stoeckert Jr., Gabriel R. Fernandes, David S. Roos, Daniel P. Beiting. MicrobiomeDB: a systems biology platform for integrating, mining and analyzing microbiome experiments. BioRxiv  and Nov 2017 Nucleic Acids Research, gkx1027
• Elizabeth D. Trippe, Jacob B. Aguilar, Yi H. Yan, Mustafa V. Nural, Jessica A. Brady, Mehdi Assefi, Saeid Safaei, Mehdi Allahyari, Seyedamin Pouriyeh, Mary R. Galinski, Jessica C. Kissinger, Juan B. Gutierrez. A Vision for Health Informatics: Introducing the SKED Framework. An Extensible Architecture for Scientific Knowledge Extraction from Data. 2017 arXiv
• Yan Tang, Chester J. Joyner, Monica Cabrera-Mora, Celia L. Saney, Stacey A. Lapp, Mustafa V. Nural, Suman B. Pakala, Jeremy D. DeBarry, Stephanie Soderberg, the MaHPIC Consortium, Jessica C. Kissinger, Tracey J. Lamb, Mary R. Galinski and Mark P. Styczynski.  Integrative analysis associates monocytes with insufficient erythropoiesis during acute Plasmodium cynomolgi malaria in rhesus macaques. Malar J. 2017 Sep 22;16(1):384. doi: 10.1186/s12936-017-2029-z
• S. A. Lapp, J-T. Chien, S. Pakala, J.A. Geraldo, G. Batugedara, F. Ay, J. Humphrey, J.D. DeBarry, K.G.  Le Roch, M.R. Galinski and J.C. Kissinger. PacBio assembly of a Plasmodium knowlesi genome sequence with Hi-C correction and manual annotation of the SICAvar gene family Parasitology. 2017 Jul 19:1-14. doi: 10.1017/S0031182017001329
• Nathan M. Chasen, Beejan Asady, Leandro Lemgruber; Rossiane C. Vommaro, Jessica C. Kissinger, Isabelle Coppens, and Silvia N.J. Moreno.  A GPI-anchored Carbonic Anhydrase-Related Protein of Toxoplasma gondii is Important for Rhoptry Biogenesis and Virulence. 2017. mSphere. 2017 May 17;2(3). pii: e00027-17. doi: 10.1128/mSphere.00027-17
• Ousman Mahmud* and Jessica C. Kissinger. Evolution of the Apicomplexan Sugar Transporter Gene Family Repertoire, International Journal of Genomics, vol. 2017, Article ID 1707231.  2017. doi:10.1155/2017/1707231
• Cristina Aurrecoechea; Ana Barreto; Evelina Y. Basenko; John Brestelli; Brian P. Brunk; Shon Cade; Kathryn Crouch; Ryan Doherty; Dave Falke; Steve Fischer; Bindu Gajria; Omar S. Harb; Mark Heiges; Christiane Hertz-Fowler; Sufen Hu; John Iodice; Jessica C. Kissinger; Cris Lawrence; Wei Li; Deborah F. Pinney; Jane A. Pulman; David S. Roos; Achchuthan Shanmugasundram; Fatima Silva-Franco; Sascha Steinbiss; Christian J. Stoeckert Jr; Drew Spruill; Haiming Wang; Susanne Warrenfeltz; Jie Zheng. EuPathDB: the eukaryotic pathogen genomics database resource Nucleic Acids Research. 2017 doi: 10.1093/nar/gkw1105

News

All the pieces matter: UGA researchers collaborate to solve malaria puzzle

Creating databases to help cure diseases worldwide

Jessica Kissinger elected as AAAS Fellow

Jessica Kissinger elected ASTMH Fellow

Sharing the Knowledge: NIH Award Supports Expanded Genomics Data Resource

Database offers tools for global health collaborations

Data boost: Using big data to fight disease

FungiDB: An Integrated Bioinformatic Resource for Fungi and Oomycetes

Open-access data resource aims to bolster collaboration in infectious disease research

Distinguished Research Professor 2017

UGA faculty and staff receive awards from the Office of International Education