Malaria parasites have intrinsic clocks | New Voices in Infection Biology
- Change of Time - 5 pm Berlin | 8 am San Francisco
- Date: Jul 15, 2020
- Time: 05:00 PM (Local Time Germany)
- Speaker: Filipa Rijo-Ferreira
- University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, Dallas, TX, USA
- Location: Zoom video conference
- Host: Silvia Portugal
- Contact: vseminars@mpiib-berlin.mpg.de
If you are interested in joining the seminar, please contact: vseminars@mpiib-berlin.mpg.de
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Talk abstract:
Our rhythmic world has been a driving force for organisms to evolve a clock to anticipate such rhythms. Similarly, our own circadian biology leads to body rhythms that parasites experience. Malarial rhythmic fevers are the consequence of the synchronous bursting of red blood cells (RBCs) on completion of the malaria parasite asexual cell cycle. How is this bursting synchronous across the parasite population? Are parasites following host cues or do they also have a clock to anticipate host daily rhythms? Through a combination of infection challenges where we manipulate the environment or rhythms of the host by infections of circadian mutant hosts we propose malaria parasites to have intrinsic clocks. Thus, parasite rhythms are aligned to the host daily rhythms but are generated by the parasite, possibly to anticipate its circadian environment.