Principal Investigator:
Lay Description:
T. brucei is a single-celled trypanosome that occurs in extensive parts of sub-Saharan Africa, and causes African sleeping sickness. Hundreds of thousands of individuals suffer from this disease. We plan to study the way in which the epigenome of this organism is used to allow this trypanosome to continually evade the human immune system. The epigenome of an organism represents heritable information that is encoded outside of the nucleotide sequence of its genome, and is formed by the components that package the DNA inside the cell nucleus, and modifications of the DNA molecule itself. The epigenome is an essential interface that helps to control the genetic function of DNA, and misregulation of the epigenome is responsible for many serious human diseased states, including cancer, myotonic dystrophy and autism spectrum disorders. The epigenome thus represents a potent therapeutic target, and several compounds that interfere with proteins that recognize or that confer specific histone modifications have either received FDA approval or are undergoing clinical trials. These compounds hold a tremendous promise for the treatment of diseases such as leukemia. In this project we hope to identify epigenetic targets for the development of future drugs to treat African sleeping sickness more effectively.
April 4, 2018
. brucei is a single-celled trypanosome that occurs in extensive parts of sub-Saharan Africa, and causes African sleeping sickness. Hundreds of thousands of individuals suffer from this disease. We plan to study the way in which the epigenome of this organism is used to allow this trypanosome to continually evade the human immune system.
April 4, 2018
Colonization of the upper part of the human respiratory tract (back of the nose and throat) by microorganisms is an important predictor for the development of pneumonia and wheezing illness (which may lead to asthma) in young children. Despite this, relatively little is known about patterns of colonization in early life, nor how these patterns influence the development of respiratory illness.
April 4, 2018
The goal of the proposed work is to characterize the transgenerational genomic impact of genocide exposure and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in women survivors of the Rwandan genocide and their offspring. PTSD is a common and debilitating mental disorder that has a profound public health impact. Between April and June 1994, almost one million people died in the Rwandan genocide against ethnic Tutsi.
April 4, 2018
Immunoglobulin Gene Diversity in an African Population and Impact Antibody Function in HIV Infection
Antibodies are critical components of immune defense and are mediators of vaccine-elicited protection as well as autoimmunity. The heavy and light chains that comprise an antibody molecule are encoded by germline immunoglobulin (Ig) gene fragments that recombine and undergo somatic mutation thereby generating billions of specificities able to contend with a multitude of foreign antigens.
April 4, 2018
Hereditary neurological disorders are very disabling diseases that are under-studied in Africa. Our first aim is to clinically characterize these disorders in the Malian population in order to establish a comprehensive clinical description of the diseases in this region. Our second aim is to identify gene mutations related to neurological diseases, and to explore their effects in cell culture models to further our understanding of their function and interactions and our knowledge of
April 4, 2018
Febrile illnesses are among the most common causes of morbidity and mortality in tropical developing countries. While clinical diagnostics are not currently available for many of the microbes causing fevers of unknown origin (FUO), genomic tools can enable researchers to test for a wide array of known microbes
April 4, 2018
Mycobacterium tuberculosis (Mtb) is estimated to have infected one third of the world’s population based on reports from surveys on positive skin tuberculin tests. There are 22 high-burden countries globally, among them Ethiopia, accounting for 80% of all active tuberculosis cases. The clonal relatedness of strains circulating in humans and other potential
April 4, 2018
In 2010 there were an estimated 8.8 million incident cases of tuberculosis (TB) globally, with 2.3 million of these reported in Africa, 1.1 million deaths among HIV-
April 4, 2018
African Female Breast Cancer Epidemiology (AFBRECANE) Study Project summary Breast cancer is the commonest cancer in women globally and it is increasingly overtaking cervical cancer as the commonest female cancer in low and middle income countries (LMIC). The incidence of breast cancer Nigeria was 54.3 per 100,000 per year (24,750 new cases per year) in 2014 representing a rise from 20 per 100,000 in the 1970s (3,000 new cases per year).