Christopher Schulman Schulman and Ian Smith

Abstract:

Fruit flies are a model system to study innate immunity, the processes that protect organisms against infection by viruses, bacteria, and parasites. Parasitoid wasps inject an egg into fly larva and use fly nutrients to develop into adults thereby killing the host in the process. To optimize infection, wasps also inject venom, a group of proteins that act to disable the immune response and alter metabolism to the wasp’s benefit. We hypothesize that the identification of venom proteins may reveal cellular pathways used by invertebrates and perhaps vertebrates such as humans to counter infection. As part of the Genomics Education Partnership, our goal is to use gene annotation to identify all venom proteins in three wasp species that differ in their strategies to counter the fly immune response.