Event Date
Emily Troemel, Professor of Biological Sciences, University of California, San Diego, presents "C. elegans response to infection by the Orsay virus and microsporidia".
The overall goals of our research are to dissect host/pathogen interactions in intestinal epithelial cells and to define the unique physiology of the host response to intracellular infection. As a graduate student I identified and characterized the first chemosensory receptors in the nematode C. elegans. Next, after a brief postdoctoral fellowship, I helped launch a start-up biotech company. After this company went public, I returned to do a postdoctoral fellowship, where I identified the first natural pathogen of C. elegans. Here in my own lab at UC San Diego, we are using this natural host/pathogen system to investigate how microsporidia cause disease. In our most recent work, we are studying how the C. elegans transcriptional response to microsporidia is surprisingly similar to the response to the Orsay virus, which is another natural intracellular pathogen of the C. elegans intestine. I am committed to pre-doctoral and post-doctoral training. During my 16 years as a faculty member, I have trained five pre-doctoral fellows all of whom are still engaged in research-related activities, including one who went straight to an Asst Prof. position at SDSU, and another who started a lab at SF BioHub in 2022, as well as ten post-doctoral fellows who have gone onto independent positions in academia, government and industry.
Hosts: Dan Starr (dastarr@ucdavis.edu) and Gant Luxton (ggluxton@ucdavis.edu)