MECHANISM OF HOST INVASION BY SCHISTOSOMES

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This subproject is one of many research subprojects utilizing the resources provided by a Center grant funded by NIH/NCRR. Primary support for the subproject and the subproject's principal investigator may have been provided by other sources, including other NIH sources. The Total Cost listed for the subproject likely represents the estimated amount of Center infrastructure utilized by the subproject, not direct funding provided by the NCRR grant to the subproject or subproject staff. This project is focused on understanding the interaction between human and schistosoma proteins, with the aim of identifying drug targets and/or vaccine candidates for protection from schistosomiasis. Previous work on this project has been to analyze active secretory proteins from Schistosoma mansoni during initial host exposure to invasive larvae as a method for identifying functional proteins involved in invasion and host immune evasion. This work has expanded to analyze the the natural substrates for the proteases of invasive schistosome larvae in skin, where Schistosome cercariae are incubated with sections of human skin and products of degradation extracted. In a parallel track, the active proteases across multiple species including Schistosoma mansoni, Schistosoma japonicum and Schistosomatium douthitti were characterized for proteolytic classification and activity. For these projects, we use CGL resources for structural modeling and sequence analysis of the proteolytic enzymes. Recently we have added Cytoscape for network visualization of protein-protein interactions.