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Author: Donna Huber

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

Donna Huber on April 25, 2023

Super-resolution microscopy showing malaria parasites infecting human red blood cells. credit: Muthugapatti Kandasamy, Biomedical Microscopy Core They say what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. Whoever coined that adage had probably never heard of Plasmodium. It’s a microscopic parasite, invisible to the naked eye but common in tropical and subtropical regions throughout the world. Each …

Frequency Variation and Dose Modification of Benznidazole Administration for the Treatment of Trypanosoma cruzi Infection in Mice, Dogs, and Nonhuman Primates

Donna Huber on April 11, 2023

Trypanosoma cruzi naturally infects a broad range of mammalian species and frequently results in the pathology that has been most extensively characterized in human Chagas disease. Currently employed treatment regimens fail to achieve parasitological cure of T. cruzi infection in the majority of cases. In this study, we have extended our previous investigations of more …

Chet Joyner receives $1.1 million grant to study malaria vaccine

Donna Huber on March 28, 2023

RESEARCH WILL BE IN COLLABORATION WITH YALE UNIVERSITY Chet Joyner, PhD, a faculty member in the Center for Vaccines and Immunology and the Center for Tropical and Emerging Diseases in the College of Veterinary Medicine (CVM) at the University of Georgia, is the recipient of a $1.1 million grant from Open Philanthropy to perform preclinical …

Cripowellins Pause Plasmodium falciparum Intraerythrocytic Development at the Ring Stage

Donna Huber on March 13, 2023

  Cripowellins from Crinum erubescens are known pesticidal and have potent antiplasmodial activity. To gain mechanistic insights to this class of natural products, studies to determine the timing of action of cripowellins within the asexual intraerythrocytic cycle of Plasmodium falciparum were performed and led to the observation that this class of natural products induced reversible cytostasis in the ring …

Analysis of the Interactome of the Toxoplasma gondii Tgj1 HSP40 Chaperone

Donna Huber on March 1, 2023

Toxoplasma gondii is an obligate intracellular apicomplexan that causes toxoplasmosis in humans and animals. Central to its dissemination and pathogenicity is the ability to rapidly divide in the tachyzoite stage and infect any type of nucleated cell. Adaptation to different cell contexts requires high plasticity in which heat shock proteins (Hsps) could play a fundamental role. …

An X-Domain Phosphoinositide Phospholipase C (PI-PLC-like) of Trypanosoma brucei Has a Surface Localization and Is Essential for Proliferation

Donna Huber on February 28, 2023

Trypanosoma brucei is the causative agent of African trypanosomiasis, a deadly disease that affects humans and cattle. There are very few drugs to treat it, and there is evidence of mounting resistance, raising the need for new drug development. Here, we report the presence of a phosphoinositide phospholipase C (TbPI-PLC-like), containing an X and a PDZ …

First bovine vaccine to prevent human schistosomiasis – a cluster randomised Phase 3 clinical trial

Donna Huber on February 21, 2023

Objective Schistosomiasis is a neglected tropical parasitic disease caused by blood flukes of the genus Schistosoma. Schistosoma japonicum is zoonotic in China, the Philippines, and Indonesia, with bovines acting as major reservoirs of human infection. The primary objective of the trial was to examine the impact of a combination of human mass chemotherapy, snail control through mollusciciding, …

Chemical Optimization of CBL0137 for Human African Trypanosomiasis Lead Drug Discovery

Donna Huber on January 25, 2023

The carbazole CBL0137 (1) is a lead for drug development against human African trypanosomiasis (HAT), a disease caused by Trypanosoma brucei. To advance 1 as a candidate drug, we synthesized new analogs that were evaluated for the physicochemical properties, antitrypanosome potency, selectivity against human cells, metabolism in microsomes or hepatocytes, and efflux ratios. Structure-activity/property analyses of analogs revealed …

TriTrypDB: An integrated functional genomics resource for kinetoplastida

Donna Huber on January 19, 2023

Parasitic diseases caused by kinetoplastid parasites are a burden to public health throughout tropical and subtropical regions of the world. TriTrypDB (https://tritrypdb.org) is a free online resource for data mining of genomic and functional data from these kinetoplastid parasites and is part of the VEuPathDB Bioinformatics Resource Center (https://veupathdb.org). As of release 59, TriTrypDB hosts …