Conclusions from Ph.D. work:
The reactive oxygen species superoxide and hydrogen peroxide carry distinct biological specificities.
Thioredoxin and superoxide reactivity are functionally compartmentalized within cells and tissues of Drosophila melanogaster.
My results contributed towards:
➢ The notion that antioxidants can protect Alzheimer’s disease patients from neurodegeneration (Dias-Santagata et al., J Clin Invest, 2007; Frost et al., Nature Neuroscience, 2014)
➢ The re-evaluation of the free radical theory of ageing (Doonan et al., Genes & Development, 2008; Van Raamsdonk and Hekimi, PLoS Genetics, 2009), and
➢ The elucidation of the role reactive oxygen species play during cellular differentiation (Owusu-Ansah et al., Nature, 2009; Owusu-Ansah et al., Cell, 2013) and in immunity (Ha et al., Developmental Cell, 2005).
Conclusions from post-doctoral work:
An iron storage protein (ferritin), which is required for embryonic development, is regulated in a different way according to cell type.
An iron regulatory protein (IRP-1A) mediates cellular iron sensing whereas the function of a testis-specific mitochondrial ferritin remains to be elucidated.
Drosophila melanogaster was established as a model to study iron homeostasis.
My results contributed towards:
➢ The demonstration that bacterial endosymbionts of insects modulate host iron metabolism (Brownlie et al. & Kremer et al., PLOS Pathogens, 2009), as do microbial pathogenic parasites (Chamilos et al., PNAS of the U.S.A., 2008).
➢ The identification of an iron chaperone that facilitates iron loading onto ferritin (Shi et al., Science, 2008).
➢ The identification of a new target for developing vaccination against tickborne disease, by targeting the secreted ferritin in Ixodes scapularis (Hajdusek et al., PNAS of the U.S.A., 2009) and Haemaphysalis longicornis (Galay et al. PLoS One, 2014)
➢ The realization that spermatogenesis has a special requirement for iron (Metzendorf et al., BMC Developmental Biology, 2010).
➢ The protective role of mitochondrial iron homeostasis in Parkinson’s disease (Esposito et al., PLoS Genetics, 2013).