Dr. Lina Pernas
speaker
73 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Jun 2026
last heard 2 Jul
Dr. Lina Pernas’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
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.
And then there's been very interesting work from predominantly driven by a Czech scientist, Dr. Jaroslav Fleger, that has investigated how toxoplasma impacts human behavior.
Showing 41–60 of 73 · page 3 of 4
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