Cryptosporidium genetics and genomics

I’ve worked on Cryptosporidium genomics in collaboration with Carol Gilchrist and Bill Petri at the University of Virginia and their colleagues at ICDDR,B in Dhaka to generate some genomic data from a cohort of Bangaldesh children with diarrhoeal disease. I also contributed to an improved reference genome for C. parvum.

In Glasgow, PhD student Lilly Atkins is working with Emily Hotchkiss and I to develop more discriminatory methods to genotype Cryptosporidium parvum, and then use them to study the transmission of Cryptosporidium within and betwen dairy herds in Scotland and to investigate whether or not Cryptosporidium genotype appears to explain any of the variation in virulence among infected calves.