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Distinguished University Professor lands $1.62 million grant |
| By
Kim Harvey |
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Mar 18, 2008 |
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| Komuniecki |
Dr. Richard Komuniecki, Distinguished University Professor of Biological Sciences, has been awarded a five-year, $1.62 million grant from the National Institutes of Health.
The grant will fund Komuniecki’s ongoing research on spindle-shaped worms called nematodes. The studies will track changes in nematode signaling that controls key behaviors such as movement.
Nematodes are found everywhere, living freely in soil or water, and as parasites that infect plants and animals. In addition to devastating human infections, parasitic nematodes are responsible for debilitating livestock. The worms also damage billions of dollars worth of crops, including corn and soybeans.
“Most of these worms don’t kill, they chronically debilitate,” Komuniecki said. “More than two billion people worldwide are infected with parasitic nematodes. In most cases, adequate chemotherapy is either not available or rapidly becoming ineffective due to drug resistance.”
Diseases caused by these worms, such as river blindness, filariasis and hookworm, are not common in the United States, either due to the availability of effective medications or because insects that transmit the larval stages are under control. The diseases are, however, rampant in third-world countries in Asia, Africa and South America.
Komuniecki’s research grant titled “Locomotion in Parasitic Nematodes” is designed to study how biogenic amines, such as serotonin and dopamine, paralyze nematodes. Inhibiting their movement, he said, is the key to effective control.
His research team also is at the mid-point of a second NIH-funded project that addresses feeding in nematodes. The study, “Pharyngeal Pumping in Parasitic Nematodes,” is in its third year of a five-year grant worth $1.34 million.
Both of Komuniecki’s studies use a non-parasitic nematode,
Caenorhabditis
elegans, as a model. Since the signaling pathways he is studying have clear counterparts in humans, he hopes results may be applied to the development of new medications for conditions such as schizophrenia, depression and migraines.
“C. elegans has 302 neurons and its synaptic connections have been mapped almost completely,” Komuniecki said. “Humans have billions of neurons. What we’ve found is that many of the key genes in humans have clear relatives in nematodes.
“The underlying thread for both grants is to use the free-living nematode as a model to identify key receptors and signaling pathways,” he added. “We can use these nematode model systems to identify strategies to control parasitic nematodes and, perhaps more importantly, to study basic questions about signaling in the human brain.”
Komuniecki has been invited to speak about his work at an international health symposium titled “Translating New Technologies to Improve Public Health in Africa.” The May program, part of the Keystone Symposia Global Health Series supported by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, will take place in Uganda.
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