From nutrient acquisition to drug resistance, membrane transport is especially important for intracellular parasites! This review will help you stay up-to-date on the latest transport research for crypto/malaria/toxo: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Follow-up experiments confirmed that MVP1 controls microvilli elongation during Cryptosporidium infection!

…mirroring the host interactions of the pathogenic E. coli virulence factor MAP... WHICH IS ALSO KNOWN TO DRIVE MICROVILLI ELONGATION 🤯

When we dove into the function of the most highly expressed family member, MVP1, we discovered interactions with host actin modulators EBP50 and CDC42…

Here, we describe a new family of virulence factors that the parasite exports into the host cell following infection that… localise to the microvilli! We named this new family the MicroVilli Proteins or MVPs. 😉

During a Cryptosporidium infection it’s easy to find intestinal epithelial cells that harbor the parasite… Why? Infected cells have looooooong microvilli... 2-4x the length of uninfected cells (image from the amazing David Ferguson with parasites in color).

..and parasites emerging without Cp23:

…and with an inducible knockout strain we uncover a role for Cp23 in motility! See if you can spot the emerging (control) parasites:

…we identify the antigen 'Cp23' as essential for survival…

….we then screen a group of potential vaccine candidates to determine their impact on parasite survival….

….we first test this method against the pyrimidine salvage pathway – the genes that parasites use to acquire DNA bases for replication…

Cryptosporidium is an important public health threat, and it deserves better genetic tools to study it! Here we’ve developed a targeted in vivo CRISPR genetic screen to identify parasite genes required for survival and virulence…
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

….we then screen a group of potential vaccine candidates to determine their impact parasite survival….

….we first test this method against the pyrimidine salvage pathway – the genes that parasites use to acquire DNA bases for replication…

Filling up on our 3Cs in Philly: crypto, colleagues, and cheesesteaks! Thanks to Boris Striepen and Chris Hunter for a truly inspiring first #Cryptosporidium conference

Had a blast at #CoccidianDayUK23. Great to hear the exciting parasite research going on. Thanks
@clarehardinglab.bsky.social for organising & allowing us to share our work: Mitch Pallett, Lotta Baumgärtel, @ghostpathogen.bsky.social, Lucy Watson, Elena Rodrigues. Still recovering from the ceilidh!