Sebastian Lourido: And we come back and I have kind of swollen lymph nodes. I don't feel terrible, but, I it's notable. And my mom is a physician. She's a medical geneticist. And I often joke that in my household, a diagnosis is a form of love. Welcome to Beyond Biology. This is the MIT Learn podcast, in which we explore the science behind health in the context of personal story. I am Mary Ellen Wiltrout, and this is Sebastian Lourido. My guest today, Sebastian, is a member of the Department of Biology, is a professor and also a core member of the Whitehead Institute. Welcome, Sebastian. Thank you, Mary Ellen, it's so wonderful to be on this podcast.

Yeah. Thanks for joining me. You're an expert in parasites, so that will be our topic today. And so I want to start with just a question for people to think about. 1 in 3 people are likely walking around carrying a parasite right now today. Is that true or false? That's true. And probably many more are carrying viruses somewhere in their body. And so let's go through all parasites. What are they? And you know in comparison to viruses as well. Yeah that's a great question. I think we're often thinking about the definition of what a parasite is. And there are depending on what hat I put on different definitions.

On the one hand there is the most general definition, which is sort of any other organisms that's living off of another organism. And from that perspective, many viruses are parasites, many bacteria are parasites. And some of the organisms that we'll get to. But from a kind of clinical dimension, often when a pathogen is not a virus and it's not a bacterium and it's not a fungus, it then becomes a parasite. And so it's a little bit of a catch all term. And a pathogen is an organism that infects another a human organism. Yeah. And in some cases that relationship can be more or less deleterious. Right. And and I think there's an interesting perspective in terms of the kind of history of science and how knowledge comes to be.

There's a kind of dimension where we were identifying some of these organisms originally in the context of illness and what was causing a person to to become sick or what was the basis of a communicable disease. And yet, as we've studied more the environment, we kind of understand that many of these organisms are coexisting without any deleterious effect on on one another and in some cases, actually beneficial consequences to their interaction. Right. This is a little bit that I mention of the microbiome that we've, I think, over the last few years, come to appreciate just how important it is for us as individuals to have a healthy community of microorganisms on our skin, in our gut, and allowing the proper functions of acids organisms is.

It's also almost a team effort between all of those microorganisms and ourselves. Yeah, so not everything that is living inside of us is really could be detrimental. It could be anything. And it may in some cases be beneficial in like the microbiome that you're mentioning. Correct. Yeah. It's a very interesting relationship. Right. Because in some cases that equilibrium can break down. And the organisms that were sort of peacefully living on us, inside of us all of a sudden become detrimental and pathogenic. In other cases, these interactions appear to be, innocuous. And then over long periods of time, they end up accumulating kind of damage.

And, and issues that may lead to cancer may lead to neurodegeneration or other kind of systemic chronic diseases. So let's, walk through parasites more at a general level. What are some different types of parasites? And maybe this family is a catch all kind of family. So in my mind parasites are one of the most diverse categories of pathogens. I think that's accurate. We can broadly, kind of break down the category of parasites into animals that are parasites. And in that category, we find things that live on top of us. And some of this will be kind of gross to to the audience. But you can think of lice and ticks. And, certain kinds of arachnids, spider mites that it might actually, live on your eyelashes and are actually found also in about a third of people.

And so those are the tiny animals that colonize our bodies in different ways. There's also single celled eukaryotic. And I'll define what that is. Organisms. And so when we kind of broadly divide life, there are the kind of simpler organisms that include bacteria. There are the very small kind of replicating organisms that require infecting something else, that are the viruses. And then when we talk about eukaryotes, which is actually the category of life that we belong to, there's a lot of single celled eukaryotes that are swimming in pond water. Sometimes living in us. And that's what we'll be talking about a lot today.

And their genome is more complex. They have sort of more genes encoded in their DNA. It's also enclosed within a specific structure that we call a nucleus. If we were to take a look at our skin cells or our gut cells. We would find that the DNA in those cells is largely in this compartment called that nucleus. And that's the same organization that we find in the single celled organisms. And those actually encompass most of the variation that exists among eukaryotes. It's really fascinating, right? We tend to learn about cell biology from the perspective of maybe a few model organisms of yeast. Sometimes a little bit of plant cells, but mostly of mammalian systems of our own kind of biology.

And yet these other organisms have just wild, divergent biology, like in some cases, they're doing fundamental processes. Completely differently to, to our own or living in extraordinarily harsh environments, including the ability to live inside of our own cells, which I think is really fascinating. It's sort of a clash between two incredible complexities, our own and that of a eukaryotic protist. And how that kind of works out. And the biology that supports that is one of the kind of motivating drives behind our lab. Yeah, no single celled. And like you mentioned, people may be creeped out by listening to this episode.

That's one of the, you know, features of parasites is that you start to realize, like, oh, that could be in my food or that could be in my water. So let's, describe a few of those, maybe in just physical terms. Even so, you mentioned that some are single celled, and so that means we wouldn't be able to see them. Could you maybe name a few parasites and and what, the most common parasites that you and maybe physically describe, like what they might look like. Yeah. So maybe one of the ones that is very widely distributed across the world but fairly absent within the US. And, and that's because of good hygiene and, and safe food practices is, the soil transmitted helminths, which are worms that live in our intestinal track.

Right. And so that would be a relationship that historically has been found in kind of throughout human history, but we've been able to largely eradicate them from developed countries on the basis of good sanitation. Another category now in the kind of microscopic is the organisms that we work on in our lab, which is Toxoplasma gondii. And it belongs to actually a really large family of over 5000 named species that are found infecting pretty much every animal group on Earth. Right. And so they have this rich parasitic history. Almost all of them can only replicate in the context of infecting a host. And so they have developed some very kind of specific skills to be able to enter and transmit between those hosts and ultimately replicate within them.

Yeah. So those are very prevalent and not selective at all. And who are who they're infecting? There are some parasites that cause serious disease and maybe more mortality, and we're not going to get into a lot of detail in those categories today, but maybe it's worth mentioning now a few of those. So one of Toxoplasma is cousins, if you will, is the group of parasites that cause malaria. And that continues to happen throughout the globe. There are over 200 million infections annually and about half a million deaths as a consequence of malarial infections. And so that's probably one of the most prominent parasites in this group.

The group, by the way, is called the Apicomplexa. Outside of the Apicomplexa, there's a bunch of other parasitic protists that, are important consequences of human morbidity. There's the ones that cause sleeping sickness, throughout Africa where their vector is found. So some of these small microscopic parasites are being transmitted by the bites of insects. And in that case their domain is sort of restricted to where that insect is found. And that tends to be the case for African trypanosomes in the Americas. There's another set of insects, that are like these little bloodsucking beetles. And so where you find those, you also find transmission of the American trypanosomes.

That's called a Trypanosoma cruzi that causes these chronic infections that end up to enlarged heart and other organs and can be very damaging that over that long period of time. So again, a lot of diversity that you can find. The last one that I'll mention is maybe Giardia, which you can find, you can get infected with when you're maybe out hiking, drinking water out of a natural stream. It's found often in, in animals. And when those animals through their feces contaminate the stream, you can then accidentally kind of acquire it, and it causes diarrhea and a disease in humans. Yeah. So a common way the humans are obtaining these parasites are through water, through food.

You mentioned, through these other vectors, you know, like, the insects. But in, in a recent news for the U.S., we have a case where there is, food borne, parasite in the news right now. Do you want to mention that category as well? That one's also in the Apicomplexa. And families are close relatives of Toxoplasma. Cyclospora. And those are going to be infecting our intestine. And I think through the infectious process are going to cause a kind of diarrheal disease, that is very uncomfortable and very, usually self-resolving, but when it's not, it'll be more difficult to treat right and. Potentially deadly when there's dehydration and other.

Compromised individuals. But I would say that maybe kind of one of the challenges is that because in the US, we don't see parasites as often, there's often a challenge in, in diagnosing them. Right. Knowing it was caused by a parasite wasn't obvious at first for officials around the US. Until you start getting the epidemiology involved then and now, I think many physicians are thinking about it. Yeah. Let's go through Toxoplasma gondii your expertise and talk about your favorite parasite more. And so we let's start with the disease. It causes, the symptoms and maybe who's susceptible to that. Yeah. Great. Great point.

So Toxoplasma, as you hinted at, is found in about a third to a quarter of the world's population. So this is a mind boggling number of people who are carrying this parasite with them. And so let's break that down since obviously all of those people aren't suffering the consequences or don't even know that they're infected. In most cases, when we associate Toxoplasma with disease, it's either because a person is immunocompromised and their immune system has no ability to control the parasite as they are replicating, and then that ends up causing a lot of tissue damage, particularly in vulnerable areas. So we can talk about this more.

But one of the tricks that this parasite has is the ability to essentially cross any biologically restrictive barriers. So while other diseases have a hard time getting into our brain or when an individual is pregnant, getting into the fetus across the placenta, Toxoplasma can just cross those and infect those niches where we have very different pathways for immunity and in many cases, very weak immunity. And there it can, of course, cause terrible harm because these are very vulnerable parts of of our anatomy. And that's why we had the blood brain barrier. Exactly. Toxoplasma in some cases. And, and this also seems to be somewhat geographically distributed, depending on what strains or how often you're acquiring Toxoplasma, but in some cases it can go into the retina.

Right? Which is the part of our eye that we use for seeing. And there it can start damaging those cells and cause these inflammatory responses, that essentially start degrading your vision. And so in South America, Toxoplasma is one of the leading causes of infectious blindness. And a very major concern in that regard. Once you lose some of those retinal cells, they don't come back. And so you essentially have areas of, of your vision that are no longer capable of perceiving light. So you yourself, you grew up in South America. You were infected with Toxoplasma, at some point in your life. Can you talk through that story?

I. Often tell the story because it it sort of was a reunion when I started studying Toxoplasma as a PhD student. I was 17, and actually, we had just come back from a family trip to to France. And France famously has very high incidence of Toxoplasma, so it's worth and if there's an aside noting how, how do we know that someone has Toxoplasma? Usually what we do is we take a sample of their blood, and in the blood you can find antibodies against, infectious agents that the person has been exposed to. Right. And so you can find Toxoplasma specific antibodies. And that's because of our immune response to the parasite.

Yeah. And so that's where those measures of a quarter or a third of the world's population is infected is because there have been studies of serology of serum, of blood across those populations, across the world. And estimates have been done by epidemiologists to to say, okay, how many people have those antibodies against Toxoplasma as evidence that they've been exposed? So anyway, we come back from this vacation. I, I'm a very adventurous eater, and as soon as I was a able to kind of, like, order some undercooked steak and meat and, and, carpaccio and whatnot, I definitely jumped on the opportunity. And we come back, and I have kind of swollen lymph nodes.

I don't feel terrible, but, I it's notable. And my mom is a physician. She's a medical geneticist. And I often joke that in my household, a diagnosis is a form of love. And, and so immediately, she was kind of wondering what's going on. Of course, swollen lymph nodes can be associated with, very severe disease. It's like leukemia. Not, but it's not very specific. And so we went to the doctor, ran a whole battery of tests, and at the end of the day it came out, he has toxoplasma. Yeah. Because I would have been your first guess especially. You were just in France and not you weren't thinking about what you were eating. Yeah.

Or being at high risk at 17. Exactly. Much later, I ended up finding out that, even though we were pointing our finger, at the the trip to to France, that Columbia has really high rates of Toxoplasma as well. And in my own, native city of Cali, 68% of people have antibodies against Toxoplasma. Yeah, that's where I thought you would have said you picked it up there locally. Like not from France, but, you know. And it's it's difficult to know. Because again, it's, it's so prevalent and, and all you get are the antibodies. There's actually this trick that you can do with a, with the antibodies that when, when they just that immune reaction just started, you get a different type of antibodies than when the reaction has really matured.

And so on the basis of that it is possible to diagnostically tell whether the infection was recent or a long time ago. And so it's part of that recency that allowed them to say, okay, this is likely the cause of your new swollen lymph nodes and it will self resolve. And and most of the time you don't even treat it when there aren't any other associated symptoms. Yeah that would have been my next, you know, question. And you mentioned earlier it's pretty dangerous for pregnant women. And so do we want to expand upon that. And what that means for what are the outcomes for birth. If you know, if there is an infection in the mother?

I always like to say that I'm not a medical professional. Right. So for your audience out there, they should consult actual. Yeah. Physicians. But the this kind of general understanding in the Toxoplasma field is that that susceptibility really comes from the fact that the parasite can cross the placental barrier. But the gloss on it is that if a mother kind of going into that pregnancy has already been exposed to Toxoplasma, and so the individual would have already an immune response and antibodies against Toxoplasma, then the pregnancy is protected by that immunity. And so it's not a problem. So that the real problem comes about when an individual who has never experienced Toxoplasma gets infected for the first time during the pregnancy, and in that case, the parasites can replicate rather uncontrollably within the developing fetus and and cause a lot of damage depending on when it's caught relative to that and how far along the pregnancy is.

You can also have then a sequelae on the child, once, once they're born, which often have neurological components or ocular components, sort of like that, that retinal, problems that I was outlining for some individuals. Yeah. So there's as many of as 190,000 cases that come from this sort of at birth, infection. And because of that, in June 2026, the World Health Organization has just named, Toxoplasma gondii, tropical neglected disease. And so, with that label now, it's because of this, you know, load of so many new cases coming out each year, but also then because if it's something like blindness that will lead to a lifetime, impact, not just a one time thing, you can't be cured of the blindness in time, right?

And so, other reasons, there's more attention to Toxoplasma gondii right now, gondii right now in this year. And, you know, what types of patterns of infection are changing or is load changing. And the current day. It's likely not a change in, in the prevalence, but rather and I think that this is where that neglected moniker is, is useful, in fact, that we haven't been considering it as a source of human disease generally. Right. And and we haven't been appreciating enough in many cases, the morbidity that is associated with it. It's very easy to focus on causes of death. Right. And those tend to really grab our attention.

And so when we talk about some of these diseases these many people die of sleeping sickness. In the case of African trypanosomes of malaria, in the case of the Plasmodium species, in the case of Toxoplasma, the number who die from it is relatively small, particularly when there are therapies to control for severe, immune deficiency and good treatments for Toxoplasma and good screening. But there's a lot of morbidity associated with it, right? Those children who, have maybe retinal scarring because of congenital toxoplasmosis, or individuals around South America who are, experiencing that loss of eyesight, or other consequences associated with Toxoplasma, those those end up having an impact throughout the course of that individual's life.

And when we now start thinking about those consequences of how different would their lives have been had they not experienced Toxoplasma, had we been able to control that and avoid it? When we actually start focusing our attention on a group of organisms that is quite different from the ones that we were focusing on on the basis of mortality, and that have really meaningful consequences to human life and human development. Another set of parasites that falls into that category are certainly the soul transmitted helminths, which people are not dying from, so transmitted helminths. But they have the worms problems.

And those are the worms. Yeah. But they have problems in development of the children are heavily infected. They tend to be malnourished. They tend to have developmental problems, stunting and growth, difficulty, focusing in school. And all of that ends up being a kind of drags for their progression through life. And the name tropical neglected disease rate is also indicating where these infections are most common, and impactful because of, you know, it impacts a disproportionate amount of low income households. And I told you about friends. I told you that this is actually something that you can acquire in the US, and it's not that rare.

And so that that tropical definition is a little bit, hard to understand. In the article written by, several of my colleagues advocating for that, a change with the argument that they made is that because some of the most severe infections are happening within the global South, it deserves to be called the kind of tropical neglected disease in in the case of many tropical neglected diseases, it really is geographically restricted to that part of the globe. In this one, it's not, but the burden of the disease and the consequence of not having sufficient treatment or access to the right medical diagnostics and therapies, though that burden is falling disproportionately in the global South.

And and I find that a very compelling argument in terms of where our attention should be in health care. And, you know, from our perspective, biomedical research. Yeah. So there can be a attention to prevention with this, you know, attention with the name and categorization right now. And what would you say the most common methods of prevention would be for Toxoplasma gondii? It's difficult because it's actually not something that is being screened for in the food chain. And so if there is the possibility of getting infected from a meat, and we can talk a little bit about the life cycle and why that's the case, there's no requirement either in the US or Europe or anywhere in the world for screening the meat for Toxoplasma, it would likely be a pretty big problem, because you'd find that a lot of the food chain is actually compromised from from that perspective, and.

Without proper cooking, then you would lead to passing on the parasite to whoever was eating it. Yes. And in many cases, the the levels of infection can go down with these particular parasites by either freezing the meat or by by cooking it, to an appropriate temperature. The people like fresh meat. Yeah. And that doesn't address the problem with contaminated produce, which is sort of like a separate issue. But you're not always cooking produce in that case. Yeah. And so let's get into more of the science and relate it to the work that you do. How would attention, more attention. Toxoplasma gondii. How does that help the work that you're doing?

And what does the work in your lab? How does that contribute to helping this overall burden of the disease? Yeah. I'm going to address that very honestly because I often think about what is our motivation as scientists. And one of the things that I really love about biology is how almost every sliver of it can become a prism for all sorts of different areas of biology and all sorts of different concepts. Right from studying Toxoplasma, we can we can learn about how cells do the things they do, because there are a number of processes that are exaggerated within the cells of Toxoplasma that are distinct from the processes that are exaggerated in our own cells or any other model organisms.

So there's this real opportunity for curiosity into these organisms taking us on a wild journey that ends up allowing us to learn more about just life in general, similar with concepts of evolution. And then there are the aspects of that biology that really touch on the processes that are intimately tied to how these organisms cause infection. So a general domain that we've studied for many years is how do the parasites get into our cells? We know that that process is absolutely required for them to get where they need to go to replicate. They can't replicate outside of the cells. And yet that's not a process that occurs in other organisms.

Cells are supposed to stay separate. They're not supposed to kind of go into each other. And, and so the machinery that these organisms have evolved to do that is very specific and very distinct. And they have in part repurposed some things that we know from other parts of, of a cell biology, like the motors and a filaments that cells use to crawl on a surfaces, and which many of our immune systems are actually using those same processes to crawl around our bodies, surveying the different tissues to see if there are any pathogens around these parasites use it in a completely reconfigured way where it's kind of the opposite, as if the wheels were on top of the car, and instead are powering a sort of treadmill on the surface of these parasites.

And it's that treadmill of molecules, sticky molecules that allow the parasites to enter cells. And there are many associated questions as to how do they time when they put out the surfaces and the sticky things on their surface to, to enter cells? That needs to be timed with relation to when they contact those cells. And then there's a special set of processes that specifically engaged for this big relative to our own cells, big parasite, to be able to enter the cell without damaging it and causing it to break apart, because if they kill that cell as they're going in, there's not going to be a cell for them to replicate inside of.

Right. And so a lot of intriguing processes that are quite alien to the cell biology that's in textbooks. So you might start with the research question, but you're not really sure what you'll discover and then what your next question would be. And there may be implications to other life. But really in this case, you're finding that the processes are so unique to this parasite that they're not, you know, analogous to like, you know, yeast cells or similar to human cells kind of situation that we may have with other model organisms. Yeah, I would say that the reality of research is one of opportunities. There are questions that could not have been addressed prior to the emergence of some sort of technology.

And now we can ask those questions and get curious about those processes. And then there are other long lived questions about how immunity is being orchestrated against these organisms, or how are they able to persist within our bodies. And that's certainly another topic I want us to touch on. Yeah. For, for years, in the presence of an exuberant immune response that is squashing down their replication. And so maybe we can address that right now. Sure. You still have Toxoplasma in you. Most likely. And so it's a hard thing to know, because it's not so prevalent that we'd be able to take a sample and find it.

And so in, in animal models of infection, we know that there are in the order of hundreds of chronic sites throughout the body. And even though that sounds like a lot, there's so microscopic that, that finding it would be like finding a needle in a haystack. And so then how do we know that they're still there? Yeah. It might help to walk through the life cycle because we haven't really covered that. So we might want to start with that. And then, you know, part of that is your, you know, why you may have the organism in you right now. Yeah. So we've talked a lot about food. Yeah. And so Toxoplasma enters through the oral, pathway.

Right. Which is how we get sick from a lot of different pathogens. And, and so in the food, the parasites come out and they enter the intestinal cells, and from there, from starting to replicate in those cells, they end up migrating across the body, and you end up finding it in all sorts of different organs. They end up getting into the brain and and the eye. And all of this is being coordinated against that immune response that's really tamping down their replication. Once that immune response takes over and the replication, is, is really throttled, the parasites start being found in these chronic stages.

And so usually we find those a again in animal models and in certain kinds of samples, you find them in long lived cells. And so either muscle cells or neurons and they're the parasites have changed a lot of aspects of their biology. They're no longer replicating as fast. They've built a little bit of a wall around them, and they have the ability to persist in that state for really long periods of time. And so actually, during the Aids crisis, where a lot of people were becoming immunocompromised, those were the scenarios where essentially there was a kind of tragic natural experiment where you could see that infections that they were carrying, carriers of those antibodies against Toxoplasma had a 1 in 5 chance of developing serious, again, kind of growth of that Toxoplasma population in their bodies when their immune system was depressed.

So because another virus was causing their immune system to be suppressed, then that led to this, plasma of those basically hiding in muscle cells or the brain to become active again. Exactly. And then they started having symptoms because of the Toxoplasma gondii infection instead. Yeah. And and so now we know that when a person is so severely immunocompromised, if they have antibodies, we should prophylactically start treating them against the Toxoplasma to prevent a, any any issue with. Yeah, we didn't really mention before the specific treatment part. And when you said give them that treatment, what would that be in medicine.

Yes. So they tend to be kind of small molecules, antibiotic like molecules that are specific for Toxoplasma usually targeting what's called the folate pathway, which are some of the kind of metabolic pathways that are really important for the parasite to grow. And notably, those treatments that we have available in the clinic right now are really effective against the actively replicating parasites, but they're not effective at all against the chronic parasites. So even though we have treatment available, we can never fully cure an individual. And so you mentioned in your own work, there's some interesting aspects about the tools that are available and then that, you know, potentially could have impact in other fields, not only just the specific organism in a lab you work in.

And so do you want to mention advancements in tool development and how that may really be impacting science and especially science of parasites right now. Yeah. So one really kind of remarkable transformation in a lot of cell biology has been an increase the availability of genetic tools. And that's really been driven by, something that some of your listeners may already be familiar with, which is the discovery of Crispr. And so just to kind of recap, what made Crispr really special was that you could send these molecular scissors to any region on the DNA on the basis of a very short sequence of DNA, that we can very easily sort of recode and change, that guides those molecular scissors to a specific site.

Our prior ability to do that was was much more limited. It was based on developing very specific molecular scissors that worked against one site, but we would have to completely redevelop them and it would take months to send them to a second site. But now, because the crisp processors are being sent by this short sequence of of of RNA and that can be synthesized so easily, you can now think of sending them in different organisms to different locations to essentially cut and disrupt different genes, or in later generations, cut and modify certain loci. And so we're thinking about them now. A and I guess this is the broader scientific we as therapeutics because we can correct inborn, genetic defects on the basis of, of that genome editing with Crispr.

And that's just so much more specific and, and conveniently programable than anything that was previously available. So that's sort of the broader frame. Yeah. The impact of that in many of these parasitic organisms is that they were really difficult to manipulate genetically. And what that means for a scientist is that our ability to relate the sequence in the parasite's DNA to the function of those products that are encoded within that DNA is compromised if you can't experimentally disrupt and see what happens. And so now with Crispr, we can do this at an enormous scale with remarkable efficiency. So where during my PhD, it took me something like three years to disrupt a single gene with the old technology.

Now, behold, an Crispr like, a lab a member in my lab can go in and disrupt every single gene. In the Toxoplasma genome. There are 8000 genes in a single experiment. And ask which genes are important for the parasite's ability to grow in human cells, or to grow under this drug, or to grow in this context of an immune presence? And, and that has been really transformative for our ability to rapidly discover some of this new biology. And many of it actually ends up being conserved across all of these parasites that make up the broader umbrella of Apicomplexa and parasites. That includes malaria and other parasites that I haven't mentioned, like Cryptosporidium or a more emerging tick borne infection in, the the northeast where we're located, called babesiosis, which is kind of related to the malaria, but transmitted by ticks.

And so that core biology is being uncovered by experiments that we can do routinely. And Toxoplasma. Know. And so these new tools, Crispr is really unlocked and opened the doors for many more experiments and a much rapid pace, more rapid pace than you were doing experiments during your time as a student. So your students can outrun you many times in running their experiments. But that'll lead to faster discoveries. And, you know, then, as you're saying, this ties back to therapeutics potentially, as well, an understanding mechanism directly ties to therapeutics. Yeah. Biological knowledge is just so useful in a bunch of different ways.

Right. There's sort of the direct way where maybe you are identifying something that's critical for the parasite to survive, and you can come in with a drug and treat that and kill the parasites. And that's, I think, a very kind of obvious context. But the other context that we can think about is, for instance, there are a lot of drugs that have been developed that are, being used against malaria and malaria. Parasites are evolving resistance. And so our ability to understand that resistance is actually predicated on our understanding of their underlying biology. So you can do these studies where you can say, okay, this parasite resistant, this parasite is not and I can compare their genomes and see what's different, what makes this resistant parasite resistant.

But if I don't know what those genes do, it's very hard for me to understand which might be just mutations that accumulate in any given parasite and which are actually functionally consequential for their ability to resist a drug treatment. And so then that compromises our ability to survey the population for how frequently resistance is out there to come up with alternative treatment, maybe cocktails that prevent that resistance from emerging. There are many different ways in which just a fertile, prolific knowledge base ends up advancing our ability to deal with these challenges in biology. Yeah. So we, really, I feel like we've only scratched the surface of parasites so far, and there's so many more questions, I'm sure, but I want to maybe turn the focus more on you and, you know, give some background on, you know, context to who you are.

And so, as you were growing up, you had interests in art, and you became a scientist. So how do you how did you merge those interests, or did you end up merging them? Or because your mother was a doctor, did she, you know, try to push you in the path of a more traditional career during those days? And, you know, how might people think about those interests, and career paths they might take? Those are more questions that we have for parasitology, but they address them in, in points. Definitely. Growing up, I sort of had the two interests and they weren't necessarily, related. I think I was a very curious kid.

And I was interested in understanding the world around me. And that included a lot of curiosity around the natural world. I did grow up in my mother's laboratory, and, you know, she had a microscopes all around. They were doing a by hand, carrier types, which are a form of genetic diagnostic where you can look at the genetic material when it's condensed into chromosomes and by the, the fetus on this chromosomes before we could rapidly sequence everything. You can tell whether someone has a particular genetic, a disease or not. And so I was always kind of looking at slides and looking at different things under the microscope.

And so those two sources of curiosity were really merged. And around middle school I started getting interested in the visual arts and in sort of like capturing things as a, as a form of expression. And I did that actually through college. I sort of tried to keep the two in parallel, and I was spending equal number of nights in the studio as I was, late nights in the laboratory, trying to kind of keep those two passions alive. And it created sort of enough dissonance. I wasn't really sure what I wanted to do, but I ended up not going to graduate school straight away and instead finding, position to be a technician in the lab in, in Berlin.

And that was really formative. In fact, that lab worked on intracellular bacteria and sort of like a similar concept to, to some of the topics that Becky has studied. Different class of bacteria, salmonella and, and Shigella. And I got to sort of fall in love with the creativity and curiosity of science and the ability to build on the knowledge of others and that very, very fast sharing where a lot of the artistic practice, at least as I had learned it was a little bit more isolated and and it was almost like the vector of sharing was, from my own perspective to you. This became this scientific process was much more collaborative, was much more, learning from others, integrating, mixing it with my own kind of creativity and perspective and, and sharing it back with the world.

So you can see parallels in the creative creativity part. But really it was the community part that drew you more to science? I think. So, and, and to this day, I think that continues to, to be the case, even though I remain having this extraordinary affection towards, towards art and in some ways, seeing the world a little bit more through that lens than I do the analytical lens. Right. I think that this touches on there's a lot of different ways of doing science. And, you know, many of our colleagues, as I do, there's there's almost as many ways of doing science as there are colleagues. Yeah, right. As there are scientists here, here at Miti.

And each one brings to that a very different personality, a very different process. There are some that you could categorize as much more analytical. They have a question and they are trying to, address that question with whatever means they have at hand. There's another one that is much more like a discovery based process, where you're trying to familiarize yourself and understand a kind of broader area. And in there you start almost like picking up objects in a room and and trying to figure out what they are and how they come together and sort of what that tells you about the broader ensemble. Interestingly, I think if you go into the art world, you also find those kind of different categories of some people who are just trying to express something very pointed, and other people who are just kind of experimenting with the materials, right, or just figuring out how things work and much more in kind of conversation with their own art.

And so that just speaks to how many different paths to creation and the approaches. Yeah, to science there are in art as well. And you even though you're not the practicing artist per se right now, but you are in a field that's a very visual science. So I'm sure this allows you to bring out the artist in you occasionally. I think maybe too frequently. Yeah. I mean, there are so many members may say otherwise, but. I know I often drive them crazy with the kind of like visual representation of the science, because that certainly that is how I connect with science. It's through the images, sometimes through the figures and the way the things that a story is visually told that ends up being very important for how we communicate science in a lecture or how we communicate science through a the literature through papers.

Because I, I don't know if all of your listeners, realize, but a lot of our papers are the figures, right. And how you kind of narratively connect all of these different experiments into something that's comprehensible. And that communication of science is very key. And being able to communicate science visually to the public is key. And that's why we're doing this podcast as well, and that's why we have that now. But we, right now we'll sort of just wrap up the conversation today. But I know there's so much more to talk about. But if you want to learn more from Sebastian, we do have more courses on Learn Mid Edu, and you can explore cell biology through Sebastian's view and what he teach Teaches summit undergrads as well.

But thank you so much for joining me today, Sebastian. There was, I'm sure a topic that many people will learn from in this conversation. Thank you, Mary Ellen. I really great to be able to share it with you through this medium. I also learn a lot through listening, and I hope that, many of your audience members will kind of similarly learn from this experience and, and just become curious and explore more. Thank you.