Bethany Weston

• BSc (Hons) Biomedical Genetics
• Structure and function of microsporidian transport proteins

Microsporidia are obligate intracellular parasites of a broad variety of hosts, including immune-compromised humans.  Microsporidians have lost many metabolic pathways including those for making energy and for making the building blocks (nucleotides) of DNA and RNA.  In order to compensate for these missing pathways, microsporidians use transport proteins to steal substrates including energy and nucleotides from the infected host cell.  I will study the transport proteins of a microsporidian isolated from a patient with HIV/AIDS, and will formulate and test hypotheses of their function using computational analyses and lab experiments involving a variety of molecular biology techniques.

Project Supervisor: Professor T. Martin Embley, Institute for Cell & Molecular Biosciences

Funding source: Newcastle University