Trained as a microbiologist at the University of Victoria, I’m the Section Manager of Microbiology Research at the Canadian Food Inspection Agency-Dartmouth Laboratory in Nova Scotia.
Over the last decade, my research is focused on studying, at the physiological and molecular levels, the relationships that exist between virulence (a measure of a pathogen’s ability to cause disease) and fitness (a measure of a pathogen’s ability to survive and grow in different environments) in foodborne and waterborne bacterial pathogens. An understanding of these relationships would help us in controlling the spread of infectious diseases.
Role in Syst-OMICS
With my colleague John Rohde, I’m in charge of Activity 1.4.2 of the project, which aims at developing a high-throughput method to assess the virulence of selected Salmonella strains in two protozoan models: ciliates and amoebae.
It is reasonable to hypothesize that bacterial virulence factors used by contemporary human pathogens (like Salmonella) first evolved in the context of continuous bacterial interactions with bacteria-eating microbes (amoeba and ciliated protozoa), before animal forms of life emerged. These factors must still play an important role in the survival and persistence of foodborne pathogens outside the human host, providing an excellent example of virulence-fitness relationships. Besides highlighting potential (and arguably important) differences between environmental and clinical isolates of Salmonella, the presence or absence of genes associated with survival in protozoa could also be exploited both in the development of novel (albeit unconventional) Salmonella enrichment protocols required for its isolation in diagnostic testing, as well as in risk characterization of Salmonella isolates.