Professor Sheiner receives £3.3m Wellcome Discovery Grant
Published: 9 December 2024
Professor Lilach Sheiner has been awarded a Wellcome Discovery grant of over £3.3million to investigate the biology of Toxoplasma mitochondria and decipher its function during animal infection and persistence.
The School of Infection & Immunity's Professor Lilach Sheiner has been awarded a Wellcome Discovery grant of over £3.3million.
Awarded three times a year, this scheme provides funding for established researchers who want to pursue bold and creative research ideas to deliver significant shifts in understanding related to human life, health and wellbeing.
Together with Dr Anita Koshy from the University of Arizona and the University of Helsinki's Dr Alexander Mühleip, the team will utilise the funding to investigate the biology and function of Toxoplasma mitochondria.
Specifically, the research, funded for eight years and titled ‘Role of Toxoplasma mitochondrial respiration and ATP synthesis in parasite survival, virulence, and persistence – a complex story’, aims to decipher the parasite mitochondrion function during animal infection and persistence.
Professor Sheiner said: "This funding allows us to reveal how pathogen mitochondria support and promote infection.
“This is transformative to our understanding of infections where the focus on mitochondrial functions is fairly recent still and where attention has been primarily on the host mitochondria, which we will now shift to the pathogen.”
First published: 9 December 2024