Margot Karlikow

• PhD
• PostDoc Position at University of Toronto

Nucleic acid sensing powered by the sequence recognition of CRIPSR technologies has enabled major advancement toward rapid, accurate and deployable diagnostics. While exciting, there are still many challenges facing their practical implementation, such as the widespread need for a PAM sequence in the targeted nucleic acid, labile RNA inputs, and li...

Access to low-burden molecular diagnostics that can be deployed into the community for testing is increasingly important and has meaningful wider implications for the well-being of societies and economic stability. Recent years have seen several new isothermal diagnostic modalities emerge to meet the need for rapid, low-cost molecular diagnostics....

T he 2015-2016 outbreak of the Zika virus in Latin America transformed the virus into a global concern that infected an estimated 210,000 patients and caused congenital anomalies in thousands of newborns in Brazil alone 1-6. This public health crisis highlighted the need for rapid and low-cost testing that can be deployed beyond the reach of centra...

In low-resource settings, resilience to infectious disease outbreaks can be hindered by limited access to diagnostic tests. Here we report the results of double-blinded studies of the performance of paper-based diagnostic tests for the Zika and chikungunya viruses in a field setting in Latin America. The tests involved a cell-free expression system...

Recent advances in cell-free synthetic biology have given rise to gene circuit-based sensors with the potential to provide decentralized and low-cost molecular diagnostics. However, it remains a challenge to deliver this sensing capacity into the hands of users in a practical manner. Here, we leverage the glucose meter, one of the most widely avail...

The field of synthetic biology has used the engineered assembly of synthetic gene networks to create a wide range of functions in biological systems. To date, gene-circuit-based sensors have primarily used optical proteins (for example, fluorescent, colorimetric) as reporter outputs, which has limited the potential to measure multiple distinct sign...

The recent Zika and Ebola virus outbreaks highlight the need for low-cost diagnostics that can be rapidly deployed and used outside of established clinical infrastructure. This demand for robust point-of-care (POC) diagnostics is further driven by the increasing burden of drug-resistant diseases, concern for food and water safety, and bioterrorism....

Tunnelling nanotubes and cytonemes function as highways for the transport of organelles, cytosolic and membrane-bound molecules, and pathogens between cells. During viral infection in the model organism Drosophila melanogaster, a systemic RNAi antiviral response is established presumably through the transport of a silencing signal from one cell to...

During viral infection, cell survival will depend on adequately giving, receiving and processing information to establish an efficient antiviral immune response. Cellular communication is therefore essential to allow the propagation of immune signals that will confer protection to the entire organism.The major antiviral defense in insects is the RN...

RNA interference (RNAi) controls gene expression in eukaryotic cells and thus, cellular homeostasis. In addition, in plants, nematodes and arthropods it is a central antiviral effector mechanism. Antiviral RNAi has been well described as a cell autonomous response, which is triggered by double-stranded RNA (dsRNA) molecules. This dsRNA is the precu...