Dr. Lina Pernas

I had no idea what I would do.

I just knew I wanted to do something with parasites.

And why Toxo, a very famous parasite?

Toxo was very serendipitous.

I really liked Stanford.

At Stanford, there were a couple of parasites that were being researched in different labs, and the lab that I joined was one that worked on Toxoplasma.

Self-sacrificial, maybe taking it a bit too far.

I think that's more legend.

But what is known is that it rewires the brain of rodents to have them lose their fear of cats.

So by losing their aversion to this predator, Toxo finds its home and it can end up back in the cat.

My research journey was also a bit serendipitous.

It started when my graduate advisor, John Boothroyd, showed me an electron micrograph of a cell infected with toxoplasma.

And one of the most striking features of this micrograph was that all of the mitochondria in the cell, so just like toxo is well-known, I think mitochondria are even more well-known as the powerhouse of the cell, but all of the mitochondria of that cell were surrounding the parasite vacuole.

And so after seeing that image, I was...

driven by trying to understand how does this interaction happen?

Why do mitochondria end up there?

And what does that interaction mean for both the host cell, whose mitochondria are now around the parasite, and the parasite?

There very much is.

It's helped us think of mitochondria in a different way.

So I think what you're alluding to is the theory of endosymbiosis, by which about one and a half billion years ago, a smaller...