Dr. Lina Pernas

bacteria ended up in a larger archaeal cell and over evolutionary time those became our mitochondria there's hundreds of thousands of mitochondria in any given cell and for the longest time these workhorses if you will during infection were considered to be bystanders but we started thinking of them as the cellular microbiota so the same way that our microbiota protects us and gives us important nutrients we started thinking well maybe the mitochondria are not just

by standards, but the microbiota of the cell and they're protecting the cell because Alafinfina, it's their home as well.

And through this, we found that mitochondria are able to compete with invading pathogens like Toxoplasma for the nutrients that the pathogens need to grow.

And by restricting the pathogens' access to nutrients, they can restrict the growth of the pathogen.

We have investigated the nutrient competition or the competition for two particular nutrients.

One are fatty acids and the other are B vitamin folate.

And we found that upon sensing toxoplasma, the host cell can rewire mitochondrial metabolism to make these powerhouses of the cell that actually Holly gave me a great analogy for.

We think of them now more as the infantry of the cell to take up more folate or to take up more fatty acids.

Down the line, the hope would be that we can rewire our metabolism by making our mitochondria healthier, by making them take up more fatty acids, for example, which when athletes are doing a certain exercise, they burn more fatty acids, that by finding ways to engineer our mitochondrial metabolism, we can also find ways to restrict the growth of not only toxoplasma, but any other pathogen that needs fatty acids or that needs folates when it infects the host cell.

I've never quite met one.

I think this raises a very interesting question.

So one third of the world's population is estimated to have toxoplasma.

However, it's in a form that's thought to be asymptomatic.

And what's always been remarkable to me is that this form

lives potentially in our brains and is quiet.

And so for a long time, the dogma was that chronic toxoplasmosis, so when you've had the infection for more than a year, is silent and asymptomatic and doesn't affect you.

But there's more and more studies emerging that indicate that

there is a modulation of immune system function in individuals that have chronic toxoplasmosis.

So even if you don't have overt symptoms, there are changes in your immune system going on that you are not even aware of.

So I think it does affect the immune system component.