The Physics & Astronomy Colloquium Series presents William H. Guilford the Director of Educational Innovation, Department of Biomedical Engineering, University of Virginia on “The Fast and the Furious: The Biophysics of Parasite Motility” on Friday, Feb. 3, at 4:10 p.m. in Walter 245.
William H. Guilford
Abstract: Intracellular parasites often have complex lifecycles that include reproduction inside the cells of host organisms. Not surprisingly, many of these organisms cause human diseases, including malaria, toxoplasmosis, and cryptosporidiosis. The travel of these parasites between host cells, and entry into those host cells, is reliant on the motile system of the parasite. The causative organisms of the above diseases have, it is believed, a motile system common between them that drives their “gliding” – the movement of the parasite across surfaces without any discernable change in shape or motion of cellular appendages. In fact, when appropriately scaled, these parasites move as quickly as human muscle contracts, yet our understanding of this motile system is extremely limited. They are small, they lack visually obvious structures to drive motility, some of the proteins known (and presumed) to be involved have yet to be identified, and importantly never before have the forces driving parasite motion been measured. We therefore used a laser trap to measure the functioning of the motile apparatus of living Toxoplasma gondii (the organism that causes the disease toxoplasmosis) at the scale of forces generated by single molecules. We will discuss what these biophysical data tell us was right and what was wrong with the dogmatic view of parasite motility.
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