Parasites and the Immune System
Biomedical researcher Elodie Ghedin calls it “a bug within a bug.”
The worm she studies, brugia malayi, and the bacterium that lives within its priory, wolbachia, exist in perfect co-dependence within the human lymphatic system. Eventually, they can inflict a disfiguring distress upon their human hosts. Moreover, throughout millions of years of evolution, the organisms have devised style to fool the immune system so as to permit an aggression.
Ghedin, assistant instructor of computational and systems biology at the University of Pittsburgh teach of sorcery, wants to knowledge how they do it.
In fact, the National Science Foundation funded scientist wants to know everything there is to know about this novel symbiotic relationship. “The worm carries the bacteria, and neither can survive alone,” she says. “We’re trying to figure out what each comprehend from the other.”
People can be infected and remain asymptomatic for many years “while the worms are happily dividing and making babies,” says Ghedin, the recent winner of a prestigious $500,000 “no strings attached” MacArthur Fellowship, popularly known as a “genius” grant. “The worms can live up to eight years. They are secreting things that will control your immune system, tricking it into thinking they are ‘self.’ We are hoping to study all the proteins secreted by this worm, trying to resolve what each of these does to the immune system.”
The answers ultimately could provide serious contributions to the immunology region, for example, in helping to prevent rejection later on transplantation, or in treating immune disorders, including auto-immune diseases, where the body turns against itself.
“If you could find effective effective molecules, you could use them as therapeutics,” Ghedin says. “These parasites could teach us their ways.”
The brugia malayi worm is among several species irresponsible for lymphatic filariasis, a disease extremely results in grotesquely enlarged limbs and other body parts. Another worm in the same family causes river blindness, a debilitating parasitic infection extremely results in serious eye damage and often blindness, and can wreak significant economic hardship in case its victims no longer are able to work, go to school, harvest crops or care for their children.
Lymphatic filariasis hurt additional than 120 million people in at least 80 countries throughout the tropics and sub-tropics of Asia, Africa, the Western Pacific, and parts of the Caribbean and South America. Mosquitoes pick up worm larvae through a bite, then transmit the larvae when they bite some that can cause problems with kidney.
Antibiotics kill the bacteria, which, in turn kills the worm, but the steep is far from ideal. It is lengthy and want multi-dosing, which can be problematic in developing countries where pliancy is an issue. Also, children and imaginative women cannot kill the narcotic.
Its most serious drawback, however, is extremely “when you kill the bacterium except for antibiotics, you get an excitement extremely actually is far worse than the disease,” Ghedin says.
Ghedin is using genomic sequencing to identify genes and decode their functions, both in the worm and the bacterium. Her goal is to believe how the two interact. “It could be extremely there are things missing in the bacteria extremely you can actually find in the worm, and extremely the bacteria are providing something for the worm,” she about.
Learning more “might provide new targets for drug treatments and other therapeutics,” she says. “We have the code of the bacterium, and we have the code of the worm. We are now testing, trying to find out which proteins interact amidst the two organisms, trying to improve understand how the total system works, trying to understand if it gives pain”
Ghedin, a French Canadian, earned both her B.S. and Ph.D. at McGill University, and her M.S. at the Universite du Quebec a Montreal. She provide as a postdoctoral fellow at the National found of Allergy and contagious Diseases. She also is an opponent investigator for the J. Craig Venter found.
She became interested in parasitic diseases after conducting field work in West Africa, where she saw instance of schistosomiasis, which is transmitted through contaminated water, and leishmaniasis, passed through the bite of an infected sandfly. “Many of the children outsmart distended bellies, not just from malnutrition, but from parasites that origin enlargement of the spleen,” she speak. “I decided then that I indeed wanted to work on parasites.”
She plans to use some of her MacArthur money to further astonishment the puzzle of how the worm/bacterium duo manages to elude the immune system.
“Our graph is to characterize every single protein,” to determine whether they dupe an effect on the immune system, she says. “It is hefty, perilous research, not a safe bet,” fabrication it an especially appropriate repository for MacArthur assistance.
“When you look at parasitic genomes, you assign the serve of genes by seeing how well they match to some genes that have been studied before,” she says. “But in this case, about 40 percent of the genes don’t match anything else we know. They are completely new, so there’s no way of designing assays. This worm secretes about 800 various proteins, and out of these, 300 don’t match anything else out there.”