Mostafa Zamanian, an assistant professor in the Department of Pathobiological Sciences, School of Veterinary Medicine, University of Wisconsin-Madison, will speak on "Combing Target and Whole-Organism Paradigms for Anthelmintic Discovery" at the May 11th virtual seminar hosted by the UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology.
His seminar begins at 4:10 p.m., Pacific Daylight time. The Zoom link is https://ucdavis.zoom.us/j/99515291076.
"Soil and vector-transmitted parasitic nematodes (roundworms) infect over one billion people and are a major cause of global morbidity," Zamanian says in his abstract. "Parasite control in both human and animal medicine is suboptimal and threatened by the growing prospects of anthelmintic resistance. Motivated by the need for new treatments and curiosity about basic parasite biology, I will present recent work addressing questions about how mosquito-transmitted parasitic nematodes navigate through host tissues and manipulate their host environments to survive. We will discuss how advanced transcriptomic approaches can move us towards a better understanding of the molecular basis for these essential parasite behaviors, and how we can effectively combine 'target-based' and 'whole-organism' screening pipelines to help identify novel antiparasitics."
Zamanian holds a bachelor's degree in biochemistry and a doctorate in neuroscience from Iowa State University. He served as a postdoctoral fellow at McGill University and Northwestern University before joining the faculty of the University of Wisconsin.
On his website, Zamanian relates that "Neglected Diseases (NTDs) caused by parasitic worms (helminths) impose a debilitating health and economic burden throughout much of the world. These global diseases of poverty infect over 1.5 billion humans and exert their damage through a wide range of species-specific clinical manifestations. Parasitic diseases are also a major challenge to animal and plant health. The central ambition of our laboratory is to combine molecular, genetics, and computational approaches to make discoveries that improve our understanding of parasite biology and host-parasite interactions, as well as our ability to treat parasitic infections. This includes identifying new targets for drug discovery, elucidating mechanisms of drug resistance, and developing new tools for parasite manipulation and phenotypic screening. We directly study human and animal parasites, including mosquito-borne filarial nematodes, soil-transmitted nematodes, and snail-transmitted blood flukes."
Nematologist Shahid Sidduqe coordinates the Department of Entomology and Nematology seminars. For any technical issues regarding the Zoom link, contact him at ssiddique@ucdavis.edu.