Abstract
The protozoan parasite Cryptosporidium is a leading cause of severe diarrhea in young children and an important contributor to early childhood mortality. Fully effective drugs and vaccines to treat or prevent cryptosporidiosis are lacking. A main roadblock for their development has the overall poor tractability of this parasite. We established a powerful molecular genetic model to overcome this hurdle. Using this system we can now engineer reporter parasites to derive robust measurements of infection in vitro and in vivo as well asparasite mutants to understand the mechanistic underpinnings of drug sensitivity and resistance in Cryptosporidium. Cryptosporidium is also a fascinating model to understand fundamental parasite biology. How does the parasite's complex sexual lifecycle unfold, and how do parasite, host and commensals interact to shape susceptibility, disease and protection? To address these issues we are pursuing different genetic strategies to identify key factors in the parasite and in the host.This abstract is from the Experimental Biology 2019 Meeting. There is no full text article associated with this abstract published in The FASEB Journal.
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