Functional Genomic Screening of Nematocida parisii Host-exposed Proteins

Microsporidia are a divergent group of obligate, intracellular pathogens that are relatively poorly understood. The Caenorhabditis elegans intestinal infecting Nematocida parisii, has been shown to secrete a diverse arsenal of proteins to their cells upon infection, labelled “host-exposed” proteins. These secreted proteins may be serving roles as effector proteins, and the model organism Saccharomyces cerevisiae has proven to be a reliable system for the study of bacterial effectors. This uses yeast to study microsporidian host-exposed proteins. I have generated a pipeline to clone N. parisii genes into yeast expression vectors and demonstrated reliability by generating a gene set of 97 N. parisii host-exposed genes along with additional controls. Screening this gene collection identified 23 toxic genes, demonstrating that this strategy may help further understanding of microsporidian infection biology by identifying novel microsporidian effector proteins and learning more about the rules of these proteins and their expression in yeast.M.Sc