Santos, Andrew

Research Description Enteropathogenic and enterohemorrhagic Escherichia coli (EPEC; EHEC) are foodborne enteric pathogens that cause severe diarrheal disease worldwide. While EPEC is primarily an infection seen in the developing world, EHEC is among the top five foodborne illnesses requiring hospitalization in Canada, with over 22,000 infections in Canada each year and a healthcare burden approaching $240 million each year. My research aims to understand how EPEC and EHEC manipulate normal human cell functioning during infection in order to cause disease. These bacteria are able to manipulate the human cells by using a type III secretion system, which functions as a molecular needle, to inject bacterial proteins and enzymes into host cells. Once within the host cells, these bacterial proteins target a variety of human cell functions, including interfering in the cell’s ability to trigger an immune response or undergo programmed cell death. Importantly, bacterial proteins directly modify human proteins during infection, and looking at these modifications would reveal how bacterial proteins go about manipulating human cell functions during infection. Using proteomics techniques, I study how bacterial proteins modify human proteins and pathways in human intestinal cells during infection, in an effort to understand the mechanisms by which bacteria manipulate infected human cells.