Looking inside infection

Adel Talaat, once a poultry veterinarian in Cairo, Egypt and now part of the School of Veterinary Medicine, is studying gene expression of infectious agents from the inside.

Most scientists, unable to separate the genetic material of the bacteria and the host, study how diseases develop by culturing the causative agents on plates. Talaat, however, tries to understand a disease by studying the genome of a microbe when it’s living inside its host.

“We are the only lab in the country that does DNA microanalysis of bacteria living in animals on a genome-wide level,” he says.

Talaat’s research currently focuses on the bacterium that causes tuberculosis and is resistant to many anti-TB drugs.

Because Talaat can look at which genes the bacterium is using inside a host, he can analyze the function of only the genes being expressed during infection. The goal, he says, is to understand better how diseases, such as TB, develop and to generate useful therapies, such as drugs or vaccines.