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Project Title: Investigating the mechanisms of tolerance to bacterial infection
Summary: In infection, resistance is the measure of the infected host’s ability to fight the pathogen by inhibiting its growth or outright killing it. This concept has been well researched, giving the medical world tools such as antibiotics to fight infections. But the research surrounding understanding a host’s ability to maintain health and survive the hardships of an infection is still relatively novel. This concept of a host’s tolerance to infection arises from previous work in plants, where researchers described the ability of different plants to tolerate the same level of stress such as herbivory, salinity, and pathogenicity, more than other plants of the same species. Varying tolerance to pathogenicity was then found to exist in rodents, then insects, and research is now describing potential mechanisms which impact tolerance in humans. This understanding could lead to novel anti-infectives in the fight against antimicrobial resistance, as well as shed light on particular immune pathologies and why they can affect one population more than another.
In an effort to understand the mechanisms of tolerance to infection, this project will investigate the underlying molecular mechanisms by which a host tolerates an infection better, or worse, than another, using one of the powerhouses of immune genetics research, the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster.
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