Journal of Bacteriology & Parasitology

A multidisciplinary approach to characterizing virulence determinants in bacterial pathogens

International Congress on Bacteriology & Infectious Diseases

November 20-22, 2013 DoubleTree by Hilton Baltimore-BWI Airport, MD, USA

Rekha Panchal

Accepted Abstracts: J Bacteriol Parasitol

Abstract:

Bacterial pathogens possess an assortment of highly specialized systems that confer virulence and help avoid host defense mechanisms. The importance of virulence genes for bacterial pathogens is well established and specific mechanisms of bacterial resistance to host immunity might represent targets for therapeutic intervention. A challenge often faced in our understanding of bacterial disease pathogenesis is the ability to correlate various in vitro phenotypes and genotypes to actual in vivo virulence. Therefore, we sought to address this problem by utilizing a multidisciplinary approach to not only deepen our understanding of the disease pathogenesis, but also discover new therapeutic strategies. Using quantitative high-content imaging technology, we phenotypically characterized different isolates of Burkholderia mallei and Burkholderia pseudomallei. We further characterized these strains using transcriptomics and mass spectrometry tools and identified host and bacterial genes and proteins whose expression is modulated following infection. Such multidisciplinary ?omic? approaches will be useful in identifying metabolic, regulatory, signaling, and other biological pathways generated by host-pathogen molecular interactions which in turn will help explain and predict clinical manifestations of the infectious disease, host responses, disease progression, and outcomes.

Biography :

Rekha Panchal has completed her Ph.D. from Bombay University and postdoctoral studies from Worcester Foundation for Biomedical Research. She is the chief of the Target Discovery & Experimental Microbiology Department at USAMRIID. She has published more than 60 papers in reputed journals.