Najib El-Sayed
From Genomes to Infectomes: Mapping Host-Parasite Interactions
Abstract
Protozoan parasites are responsible for substantial human morbidity and mortality in the tropics. More than two billion people live in areas inhabited by insects that transmit many of these parasites, and millions are newly infected each year. Pathogenic Leishmania species cause a diverse group of diseases, collectively called leishmaniasis, that range in severity from spontaneously healing skin ulcers to fatal visceral disease. American trypanosomes cause the debilitating Chagas disease. The many nefarious mechanisms used by Leishmania and trypanosomes to thwart immune defenses thrown at them by their mammalian hosts have led to an enhanced appreciation of the diversity and complexity of host/parasite interactions. We have adopted a novel approach aimed at characterizing host-pathogen infectomes. We define the infectome as the component of the pathogen’s genome/transcriptome/proteome that allows it to subvert the functions of host cell molecular machineries, receptors, and signaling proteins, as well as the portion of the host cell's -omes that play a role in the infection process. Our studies include the use of a combination of bioinformatic tools aimed at identifying potential effector proteins, the simultaneous interrogation of the host and pathogen transcriptomes during infection and intracellular survival and protein-protein interaction screens between a selection of host and pathogen proteins informed by the first two steps. The application of this approach to Trypanosoma cruzi and Leishmania major, two intracellular pathogens that parasitize humans has yielded significant biological insights into host-pathogen interactions.
About the Speaker
Najib El-Sayed is a professor in the Department of Cell Biology and Molecular Genetics at the University of Maryland, with a joint appointment in the Center for Bioinformatics and Computational Biology at the University of Maryland Institute of Advanced Computer Studies (UMIACS). He received his Ph.D. from Yale University in molecular parasitology and then trained as a Howard Hughes Medical Institute postdoctoral fellow at the University of Iowa. He has been at UMD since 2006. Prior to moving his research group to campus, El-Sayed spent eight years at the Institute for Genomic Research (TIGR) in Rockville, Maryland where he led the sequencing, annotation, and comparative and functional genomic analyses of several human pathogens.
His research program focuses on the study of the biology of parasitism and host-pathogen interactions using genomic and bioinformatics approaches, with the ultimate goal of better understanding infection and survival mechanisms. He was the founding director of the Computational Biology, Bioinformatics and Genomics graduate student concentration area as well as the next-generation sequencing facility at UMD. He serves on the Scientific Advisory Board for the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases’ Genome Sequencing Centers for Infectious Diseases.