Washington University in St. Louis (WU)
My research focuses on the parasite, Cryptosporidium parvum, a major cause of diarrheal disease in resource limited communities. Through evolution, C. parvum has lost many typical components of its mitochondria such as a mitochondrial genome and complexes of the electron transport chain. Instead, C. parvum possesses a mitosome, a mitochondrial remnant that has been conserved to house a vital pathway for iron sulfur cluster synthesis (ISC). Through genomic annotation several components of this pathway are conserved while other vital proteins of the ISC are missing. My work aims to further explore this pathway using a biotinylation approach to pull down and identify the exact composition of this pathway in the mitosome.