Diane Edmondson
University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston, TX·Microbiology & Immunology
Syphilis is caused by a corkscrew-shaped bacterium, Treponema pallidum subsp. pallidum, that infects an estimated 16-32 million people worldwide each year, and cases in the United States have risen roughly six-fold over the past two decades.
- Fields
Microbiology & Immunology
Genetics
- Topics
Treponema pallidum
syphilis
spirochete
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Apr 2029
What they work on
- Define the nutritional requirements of Treponema pallidum, the spiral bacterium that causes syphilis, using metabolomic profiling and systematic nutrient testing to build an experimentally validated metabolic map.
- Achieve axenic growth of T. pallidum, meaning multiplication without rabbit epithelial feeder cells, by extending the conditions recently found to support limited host-cell-free multiplication.
- Perform a genome-wide mutational screen with transposon mutagenesis to identify T. pallidum genes required for growth in vitro and for virulence, and build a publicly available mutant library.
- Simplify and optimize the low-oxygen co-culture system so that continuous T. pallidum cultivation can replace propagation in rabbits for routine research use.
More about the research
For more than a century this organism could not be grown in the laboratory, so researchers had to propagate it in rabbits, which sharply limited what could be learned about how it lives and causes disease. In 2018 this group reported continuous long-term multiplication of T. pallidum outside an animal, by co-culturing it with rabbit epithelial cells in a rich medium under low oxygen (about 1.5%). Cultures have now been maintained for over five years, and the bacteria keep wild-type swimming motility, shape, virulence, and doubling time, with gene-expression profiles close to those of organisms taken from infected rabbits.
Why it matters
A simple, animal-free way to grow the syphilis bacterium, plus a shared collection of mutants, would let many laboratories study its physiology, structure, antibiotic susceptibility, and interactions with the immune system. That could support work toward better diagnostics, new drug targets, and vaccine candidates for an infection that is rising sharply in the United States and can persist for decades if untreated.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Emily Adhikari
University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, TX·Medicine & Clinical Research·Early-career
Define types of placental tissue damage in pregnancies with syphilis and correlate them with Treponema pallidum burden and newborn outcomes, compared with gestational age–matched healthy controls.
Jeffrey Klausner
University of Southern California, CA·Medicine & Clinical Research
Test whether chlamydia, gonorrhea or trichomoniasis detected in stored third-trimester vaginal specimens is linked to higher preterm birth risk, and whether risk differs by type of infection.
Jun Liu
Yale University, CT·Microbiology & Immunology
Dissect how the spoke-ring-cage protein network of the Helicobacter pylori sheathed flagellum assembles and enables optimal motility, using cryo-electron tomography with genetic and biochemical approaches.
The school
University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston: 25 labs on PI Pages, $419M a year on research, 340 research doctorates a year.
More about University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston
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