Roxana Pfefferkorn

Boston University | BU · Computational Biomedicine

Over-consumption of high-fat diets (HFDs) is associated with several pathologies. Although the intestine is the organ that comes into direct contact with all diet components, the impact of HFD has mostly been studied in organs that are linked to obesity and obesity related disorders. We used Drosophila as a simple model to disentangle the effects o...

Lung cancer is the leading cause of cancer-associated mortality. Mutations in the epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR) gene are among the most important inducers of lung tumor development, but success of personalized therapies is still limited due to toxicity or developing resistances. We expressed constitutively active EGFR (EGFRCA) exclusively...

Over-consumption of high-fat diets (HFDs) is associated with several pathologies. Although the intestine is the organ that comes into direct contact with all diet components, the impact of HFD has mostly been studied in organs that are linked to obesity and obesity related disorders. We used Drosophila as a simple model to disentangle the effects o...

Nutritional interventions such as caloric and dietary restriction increase lifespan in various animal models. To identify alternative and less demanding nutritional interventions that extend lifespan, we subjected fruit flies (Drosophila melanogaster) to weekly nutritional regimens that involved alternating a conventional diet with dietary restrict...

Symbiotic interactions are indispensable for metazoan function, but their origin and evolution remains elusive. We use a controlled evolution experiment to demonstrate the emergence of novel commensal interactions between Pseudomonas aeruginosa, an initially pathogenic bacterium, and a metazoan host, C. elegans. We show that commensalism evolves th...

Genes for HslVU-type peptidases are found in bacteria and in a few select Eukaryota, among those such important pathogens as Plasmodium spp. and Leishmania spp. In this study, we performed replacements of all three HslV/HslU gene homologues and found one of those, HslV, to be essential for Leishmania donovani viability. The Leishmania HslV gene can...