Identification and Functional Assessment of the First Placental Adhesin of That May Play Critical Role in Congenital Syphilis.

Syphilis is a global, re-emerging sexually transmitted infection and congenital syphilis remains a major cause of adverse pregnancy outcomes due to bacterial infection in developing nations with a high rate of fetus loss. The molecular mechanisms involved in pathogenesis of the causative agent, subsp. remain poorly understood due to the difficulties of working with this pathogen, including the inability to grow it in pure culture.

Evaluation of Nucleoside Analogs as Antimicrobials Targeting Unique Enzymes in .

The first line therapy for Lyme disease is treatment with doxycycline, amoxicillin, or cefuroxime. In endemic regions, the persistence of symptoms in many patients after completion of antibiotic treatment remains a major healthcare concern. The causative agent of Lyme disease is a spirochete, , an extreme auxotroph that cannot exist under free-living conditions and depends upon the tick vector and mammalian hosts to fulfill its nutritional needs.

Protozoan Parasite Subverts Adaptive Immunity and Enhances Lyme Disease Severity.

Lyme disease is the most prominent tick-borne disease in the United States. Co-infections with the tick-transmitted pathogens and sensu stricto are becoming a serious health problem. is an extracellular spirochete that causes Lyme disease while is a protozoan that infects erythrocytes and causes babesiosis.

Tudor-domain containing protein 5-like promotes male sexual identity in the Drosophila germline and is repressed in females by Sex lethal.

For sexually reproducing organisms, production of male or female gametes depends on specifying the correct sexual identity in the germline. In D. melanogaster, Sex lethal (Sxl) is the key gene that controls sex determination in both the soma and the germline, but how it does so in the germline is unknown, other than that it is different than in the soma.

Age-Related Differential Stimulation of Immune Response by and During Acute Phase of Infection Affects Disease Severity.

Lyme disease is the most prominent tick-borne disease with 300,000 cases estimated by CDC every year while ~2,000 cases of babesiosis occur per year in the United States. Simultaneous infection with and are now the most common tick-transmitted coinfections in the U.S.

Efficient detection of symptomatic and asymptomatic patient samples for Babesia microti and Borrelia burgdorferi infection by multiplex qPCR.

Background: Tick-borne infections have been increasing steadily over the years, with co-infections with Borrelia burgdorferi and Babesia microti/divergens emerging as a serious health problem. B. burgdorferi is a spirochetal bacterium that causes Lyme disease while protozoan pathogens belonging to Babesia species are responsible for babesiosis.

Screening of patient blood samples for babesiosis using enzymatic assays.

Human babesiosis is an emerging tick-borne disease in the United States and Europe. Transmitted by Ixodes ticks, the causative agent Babesia microti is an intraerythrocytic parasite that causes mild to deadly disease. Transmission of B.

Control of a Novel Spermatocyte-Promoting Factor by the Male Germline Sex Determination Factor PHF7 of .

A key aspect of germ cell development is to establish germline sexual identity and initiate a sex-specific developmental program to promote spermatogenesis or oogenesis. Previously, we have identified the histone reader Plant Homeodomain Finger 7 (PHF7) as an important regulator of male germline identity. To understand how PHF7 directs sexual differentiation of the male germline, we investigated the downstream targets of PHF7 by combining transcriptome analyses, which reveal genes regulated by , with genomic profiling of histone H3K4me2, the chromatin mark that is bound by PHF7.

Drosophila muller f elements maintain a distinct set of genomic properties over 40 million years of evolution.

The Muller F element (4.2 Mb, ~80 protein-coding genes) is an unusual autosome of Drosophila melanogaster; it is mostly heterochromatic with a low recombination rate. To investigate how these properties impact the evolution of repeats and genes, we manually improved the sequence and annotated the genes on the D.

Assessment of methylthioadenosine/S-adenosylhomocysteine nucleosidases of Borrelia burgdorferi as targets for novel antimicrobials using a novel high-throughput method.

Background: Lyme disease is the most prevalent tick-borne disease in the USA with the highest number of cases (27 444 patients) reported by CDC in the year 2007, representing an unprecedented 37% increase from the previous year. The haematogenous spread of Borrelia burgdorferi to various tissues results in multisystemic disease affecting the heart, joints, skin, musculoskeletal and nervous system of the patients.

Objectives: Although Lyme disease can be effectively treated with doxycycline, amoxicillin and cefuroxime axetil, discovery of novel drugs will benefit the patients intolerant to these drugs and potentially those suffering from chronic Lyme disease that is refractory to these agents and to macrolides.