It’s been nearly a month since my last post! I’ve been busy working on stuff for the print magazines of Science Illustrated and Popular Science, which has kept me from writing anything for the web recently.
I plan to rectify that in a little bit, but till then, I’m celebrating the publication of my first-author paper from my PhD. Catchily titled ‘4-Bromophenacyl Bromide Specifically Inhibits Rhoptry Secretion during Toxoplasma Invasion’, it’s the culmination of several years of graduate school. To briefly summarize, I found that a chemical–‘4-Bromophenacyl Bromide’–could stop the intracellular parasite Toxoplasma gondii from secreting proteins from its “rhoptry” organelle into host cells. This is interesting because our lab at Stanford and others had previously shown that some of these “rhoptry” proteins were important in the parasite’s ability to interact with its host cells.
The research is published in PLoS ONE, the open-access journal, which means the article is available for free online for anyone who might want to read it. It does have a few pretty fluorescent microscopy images.
For more information about protein secretion in Toxoplasma and a few other related parasites, including the malaria-causing parasite, Plasmodium, you can check out a Review article I wrote on the subject a few years back.
Sorry, aber das bezweifel ich ganz stark…Baer