Category: publications

  Parasitic trypanosomatids, such as Trypanosoma cruzi, Trypanosoma brucei, and Leishmania spp., cause devastating tropical diseases, with T. cruzi being increasingly recognized as a public health concern in the United States due to established sylvatic cycles and rising autochthonous transmission. Although T. brucei has long served as the model trypanosomatid due to the array of molecular tools available for its study, T. cruzi shares …

Plasmodium coatneyi is an important model for severe malaria due to its P. falciparum-like sequestration, yet research has been limited by the lack of in vitro culture systems. Recently, molecular evidence of human P. coatneyi infections (3.5%, 3/85 of identified simian malarias in Malaysian archival samples), suggested a zoonotic potential. We report the first continuous …

Toxoplasma gondii is a protozoan parasite capable of infecting most warm-blooded animals, including humans, and can cause severe disease in immunocompromised individuals and the developing fetus. Current treatments for toxoplasmosis are effective only against the acute stage of infection and have limited or no activity against the latent bradyzoite stage found within tissue cysts. The mitochondrion …

Background: Primary Epstein Barr Virus (EBV) infection occurs during late adolescence and is characterized by the symptomatic manifestation of infectious mononucleosis (IM). Primary EBV infection in malaria-endemic areas often occurs in young children by the age of 2 and is generally asymptomatic. Primary EBV infection in children of this age results in humoral immune suppression to …

  Inorganic polyphosphate (polyP) is a linear polymer composed of three to several hundred orthophosphate units linked by high-energy phosphoanhydride bonds and is found in both prokaryotes and eukaryotes. In Trypanosoma cruzi, the causative agent of Chagas disease, polyP plays important roles in osmoregulation and persistence within host tissues and is synthesized by a polyP polymerase …

  The endoplasmic reticulum (ER) maintains an oxidative environment that facilitates the formation of disulfide bonds, a critical process for proper protein folding. Protein disulfide isomerases (PDIs) are ER-resident enzymes that facilitate the formation, breakage, and rearrangement of disulfide bonds between cysteine residues, thereby stabilizing protein structures. Although PDIs are functionally diverse, they all contain …

  Malaria, caused by intracellular Plasmodium falciparum parasites, remains a major global health concern. These parasites reside and replicate within a vacuole in host red blood cells. Egress of daughter parasites out of the vacuolar and host membranes is tightly regulated via a complex mechanism. Prior studies have suggested that a cyclic-GMP driven calcium signaling …