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0:00
Hello and welcome to
this Henry Stewart talk.
I'm Associate Professor
Dee Carter from
the School of
Molecular Bio sciences
at the University of Sydney,
New South Wales, Australia.
I'll be talking to you today
about the interface of
ecology and infection
in fungal pathogens,
with a particular
emphasis on sex
and recombination
in Cryptococcus.
0:22
True fungal pathogens which are
fungi that can cause disease in
otherwise normal
immuno-competent people
are relatively rare.
They're shown here on the right.
We have Blastomyces dermatitidis,
Coccidioides immitis,
Histoplasma capsulatum, Paracoccidioides
brasiliensis, and Cryptococcus neoformans.
These are all well adapted to
living in the environment,
but they're not very well
adapted to living in
humans and they must be all
acquired from the environment
first and establish
themselves in the lung via
some sort of
infectious propagule.
0:56
What this means is that
the propagule is at
the interface of
ecology and infection.
With a fungus infection in
a human or animal host
is a one way trip.
The fungus is not readily
returned back to
the environment,
nor can it be passed from one
infected host to another.
1:15
The interest in
my lab centers on
understanding this transition
from the environment,
via the propagule to the host.
On the left-hand side,
we are interested
in the ecology of
this process using
mating studies,
the population genetics
to understand how
the organism reproduces
and how it disperses.
On the right-hand side,
we use proteomics to
understand virulence and to
come up with new ways of
thinking about drug development.
But what I'll be talking
to you about today
really centers on the left side,
reproduction,
dispersal and ecology.
A model for this work is
the yeast pathogen Cryptococcus.
What I'm going to take
you through today is
