Speaker:

Filipa Rijo-Ferreira, Assistant Professor of Infectious Diseases and Vaccinology, University of California Berkeley

Title:

Circadian Rhythms in Parasitic Diseases: an underlying clock of malaria parasites

Abstract:

Our rhythmic world has been a driving force for organisms to evolve a clock to anticipate such daily rhythms. Similarly, our own circadian biology leads to body rhythms that parasites experience. Malaria is a parasitic disease whose major symptom is fever. Malarial rhythmic fevers are a consequence of the synchronous bursting of host’s red blood cells (RBCs) on completion of the malaria parasite asexual cell cycle. How is this bursting synchronous across the parasite population? Are parasites following host cues or do they also have a clock to anticipate host daily rhythms? Through a combination of infection challenges where we manipulate the environment or rhythms of the host by infections of circadian mutant hosts, we probed the rhythms of the parasites. We found that without any external cue to the parasites, their transcriptome remains rhythmic with ~60% of parasite transcripts being expressed once a day. Thus, we propose malaria parasites to have intrinsic clocks. Parasite rhythms are aligned to the host daily rhythms but are generated by the parasite, possibly to anticipate its circadian environment.

Speaker Bio:

Filipa Rijo-Ferreira is an Assistant Professor of Infectious Diseases and Vaccinology at University of California, Berkeley who studies circadian rhythms in parasitic diseases such as sleeping sickness and malaria. Our rhythmic world has been a driving force for organisms to evolve a molecular clock to anticipate such daily rhythms. Similarly, our own circadian biology leads to physiological rhythms that parasites experience. Professor Rijo-Ferreira's research seeks to understand how circadian rhythms modulate host-parasite-vector interactions and identify opportunities in their rhythmic biology to treat parasitic infections.

Webinar:

https://northwestern.zoom.us/j/94626423034
Passcode: NICO2022

About the Speaker Series:

Wednesdays@NICO is a vibrant weekly seminar series focusing broadly on the topics of complex systems and data science. It brings together attendees ranging from graduate students to senior faculty who span all of the schools across Northwestern, from applied math to sociology to biology and every discipline in-between. Please visit: https://bit.ly/WedatNICO for information on future speakers.

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