Casual Parasitic Encounter
Congratulations to Pablo's Rojas and Olwen Golden who came 4th in this years UCD Images of Research Competition. The competition aims to find the most compelling research images from across the entire University. For the past five years, the competition has offered UCD researchers the opportunity to submit compelling digital images created in the course of their research, or related to it. Further information about the competition can be found online at: www.ucd.ie/research/images/
Rojas and Golden's image 'Casual Parasitic Encounter' captures the common liver fluke, Fasciola hepatica, which is a well-established parasite of livestock in Ireland, it is estimated that 80% of cattle herds show evidence of infection. The fluke can survive for long periods in the mammalian host aided in part by a targeted manipulation of the immune response. Their research group studies this manipulation by the liver fluke and has discovered that in cattle, response to co-infection by Mycobacterium tuberculosis, the cause of bovine tuberculosis, can be masked. “Casual Parasitic Encounter” shows a cross section of the liver fluke stained with antibodies from animals given their experimental vaccine
Current research in liver fluke immunomodulation is funded by Science Foundation Ireland through the Principal Investigator Programme. Their group is also funded by an EU Framework 7 grant – PARAVAC - that is aimed at producing vaccines against a range of helminth parasites of livestock.