Noon-Seminar: Dr. David Samuel Schneider

Remarks / more information:

Once infected, hosts have two mechanisms of dealing with pathogens, the host can limit the growth of the pathogen and/or it can reduce pathology.  We term this growth limitation "resistance" and the dose response curve of host health to pathogen load "tolerance".  Over the past few years we worked on identifying tolerance mechanisms, mostly by studying Drosophila infected with bacterial pathogens.  We like this description because it simplifies complex immune responses and lets us study what really matters - the health of the host.  Unfortunately it turns out that this system is good only for looking at populations and you can't use it to deal with individuals.  To solve this problem, we adopted another ecological tool and plot health versus microbe data to produce phase plots that describe an entire infection.  This approach lets us quantitate the infection process in new ways. We are concentrating our efforts on looking at the mechanisms involved in the recovery from infection. For these experiments we use a mouse malaria model as well as our Drosophila bacterial pathogen model.  Our overarching goal is to come up with simple summaries of infection that to reveal correlations between critical immune parameters.

Packed lunch will be provided which you can eat during this seminar.

Talk to Prof. Schneider in person? Please click here for more information.

<< back to all events