I never thought this would happen, but PopSci had an article on Toxoplasma, the fascinating parasite that I spent 6 years studying during my PhD.
The article itself is about a fairly futuristic-sounding technique to use gold nanoparticles to trap the parasite, and then kill it with lasers. Right now there’s no good way to get rid of a Toxoplasma infection, it tends to stay all your life and could reactivate anytime (thankfully it usually just causes mild flu-like symptoms), so this could be promising.
Interestingly, right around the same time my PhD lab published some research in Nature Methods on a way to engineer Toxoplasma to be able to track cells that it infected. I even managed to get a shout out in the Acknowledgements section 🙂
I think it’s a cool paper and I’m really happy for my friends in the lab who worked on this. It’s interesting, and at the moment most useful to researchers. It’s great for mouse studies, where you can literally have the mouse cells infected by Toxoplasma light up using the same protein that fireflies use, Luciferase. To my pleasant surprise Ars Technica did a short article on this research as well.
So there you go, in a short span of time, there’s been two different articles on major science/tech websites about the parasite that I did my PhD work on! I never would have thought it possible, and it certainly warms my heart 🙂
[Via PopSci, Ars Technica]
Yay, all those years have finally been validated in the ‘real’ world ! 🙂
P.S: I just recognized that pineapple 😉