Members of the Chlamydiae family are bacterial pathogens that can cause sexually transmitted infection, respiratory infection, and ocular infection. While symptomatic infection is widespread in the U.S. and around the world, many more people have asymptomatic chronic infections. Chronic infection in women can cause tubal factor infertility and pelvic inflammatory disease, and can transmit to a child during vaginal birth. In addition, chlamydia is the leading cause of preventable blindness in the developing world. Chlamydia sequesters immune signaling molecules called ceramides, but the reason why is unknown. As chlamydia lacks the ability to produce its own tryptophan, ceramides may modulate an immunologically protective mechanism, the breakdown of the essential amino acid tryptophan. We modified existing colorimetric essays to measure the breakdown of tryptophan in this process. We determined that our procedure is capable of identifying relative and absolute amounts of tryptophan breakdown in the types of cells chlamydia typically infects. We plan to use this assay to demonstrate that chlamydia’s uptake of ceramides is used to stop the breakdown of tryptophan. Our goal is to quantify the activity of the enzyme responsible for catalyzing the breakdown of tryptophan and demonstrate that chlamydia directly interferes with it..
Author(s): John Fazio, Microbiology and Premedical Studies, Joseph Carlin, PhD.
Advisor(s): Joseph M. Carlin, Microbiology Department
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