Towards a microsporidian taxonomy

Dr Jamie Bojko is an Associate Professor in Disease Ecology at Teesside University's National Horizons Centre, and part of the Biodiscovery team. Jamie's research includes the taxonomic understanding of the Microsporidia - a group of obligate spore-forming pathogens with a wide host range. Jamie employs classic pathology tools (histology/electron microscopy) and experimental designs, coupled with the latest in genomic and bioinformatic techniques, to characterise novel pathogens across marine and terrestrial ecosystems. His focus has largely involved biological invasions, but the basis to all of his work resides in taxonomy.

Jonathan Snow is currently Professor and Chair of the Department of Biology of Barnard College, Columbia University. Dr Snow received his PhD in Biomedical Sciences from the University of California, San Francisco, and completed a postdoctoral fellowship at Children's Hospital Boston and Harvard Medical School. His graduate and postgraduate work focused on signal transduction, regulation of gene expression, and organismal stress responses in blood development of mammals. He subsequently became fascinated with the honey bee and changed his research focus to the study molecular mechanisms of disease in the key pollinator. Our current focus is on the biology, diagnosis, and treatment of the honey bee microsporidia parasite Vairimorpha (Nosema) ceranae. He continues his avocation as a beekeeper while teaching and maintaining an active research laboratory.

Dr Reinke is an expert in studying microsporidia, which are widespread parasites that cause death and disease in humans and other animals. Dr Reinke started his independent research career in September 2017 in the Department of Molecular Genetics at the University of Toronto. Recent work from his lab includes identifying molecules that inhibit microsporidia infection, discovering a host protein necessary for microsporidia invasion, characterising a novel intergenerational immune response to microsporidia infection, and elucidating how the microbiome influences microsporidia infection. The lab has also studied microsporidia genomic evolution and host specificity, examining the extensive ecological and phenotypic diversity of microsporidia, analysing the genomic and phenotypic evolution of nematode-infecting microsporidia, finding conserved gene expression between related microsporidia and hosts, and demonstrating widespread functional loss of microsporidia proteins. Dr Reinke has also received several young investigator awards including a Sloan Research Fellowship in Computational & Evolutionary Molecular Biology.