Collaborative efforts that involve international and national research teams are essential for our progress. We have long-standing and very productive collaborations with researchers in Taiwan, Egypt, and the U.S.
With Dr. C.C. Chen at National Yang-Ming University in Taipei, Taiwan, we explore the intricacies of melanotic encapsulation immune responses in the mosquito Armigeres subalbatus. This collaboration has also been critical in compiling our large expressed sequence tag (EST) data sets from immune response-activated mosquitoes.
In collaborations with Dr.s Hoda Farid and Reda Ramzy at the Research and Training Center on Vectors of Disease at Ain Shams University in Cairo, Egypt, we are studying interactions between Culex pipiens pipiens and Wuchereria bancrofti, a natural vector-parasite system, in an area endemic for bancroftian filariasis.
Within the United States, collaborative efforts between our lab and that of Jianyong Li at the University of Illinois have enabled us to use protein biochemistry and large-scale proteomics in studies of mosquito immune responses. Within the department of AHABS, we have invaluable collaborations with Drs. Toni Nappi (pictured below), Adel Talaat, and Nicole Perna--experts in the fields of Drosophila innate immunity, functional genomics of Mycobaterium spp., and enterobacterial genomics (respectively).
