Michele Trucksis
A Real Fish Story
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PERSON-TO-PERSON |
CURRENT POSITION
Associate Professor of Medicine, Microbiology & Immunology at the University of Maryland's (Baltimore) Center for Vaccine Development
KEY COLLABORATOR
Renate Reimschuessel
FAMILY LIFE
Trucksis enjoys cooking for her husband and two sons, comparing cooking to the challenges and pleasures of laboratory science. Since she is the only one with a sweet tooth at home, her lab colleagues and students get to enjoy Trucksis’ favorite cooking challenge, dessert. |
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| Michele Trucksis uses goldfish to develop ideas for a vaccine for tuberculosis. |
As a child, Michele Trucksis had bad luck with goldfish. They had an unfortunate habit of dying. Now her work with goldfish may help them avoid a deadly infection … and perhaps ward off tuberculosis in humans.
Now a researcher specializing in infectious diseases, Trucksis routinely works with hundreds of very-much-alive goldfish, using them to search for mutated versions of Mycobacterium marinum in search of genes that may someday lead to a vaccine against tuberculosis, a disease caused by the related bacterium Mycobacterium tuberculosis, in humans.
Those efforts may also lead to new ways for keeping goldfish and similar ornamental and food fish species free of the disease caused by M. marinum.
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| Mycobacterium marinum in cells. Courtesy of Renate Reimschuessel, U.S. Food and Drug Administration. |
Using goldfish and
M. marinum as a model for human tuberculosis infection is unconventional, Trucksis admits. But many animal models are used in biomedical research. For example, the physiology and anatomy of the heart are remarkably similar in humans and pigs; the pigs are useful to study aspects of heart disease and types of heart transplants.
The idea of the goldfish model using
M. marinum came to Trucksis through a convergence of circumstances. First, cases of human tuberculosis have skyrocketed in recent years, and scientists had yet to develop an effective vaccine — the unmet need piqued Trucksis’ interest.
Meanwhile, she had moved to Baltimore to join the medical school faculty of the University of Maryland, which is near the Chesapeake Bay, where the fishing industry plays a prominent role in the local economy.
Coincidentally, she learned that researchers at the National Institutes of Health's Rocky Mountain Laboratories had been studying the genetics of
M. marinum, an important fish
pathogen. They described it as very closely related to
M. tuberculosis.
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| Goldfish help the study of M. tuberculosis infections. Courtesy of Renate Reimschuessel, U.S. Food and Drug Administration. |
Struck with the possibility of developing a new model system, she soon joined forces with veterinary pathologist Renate Reimschuessel, and gained access to facilities where the large supply of goldfish needed in such an effort could easily be maintained.
The fish are inexpensive to grow and maintain, and they are easily handled. “They’re friendly beasts to work with,” Trucksis says. “They don’t bite.”
The project’s ultimate goal is to produce a human tuberculosis vaccine, but team members also are working toward a
M. marinum vaccine to protect fish against a devastating disease that sometimes wreaks havoc in fish farms and aquariums. The research has attracted the interest of scientists at the U. S. Department of Agriculture and the Food and Drug Administration, Trucksis says.
So far Trucksis’s group has screened about 400 mutant
M. marinum bacteria in the fish and identified about 10 genes involved in virulence — how easily a pathogen can overcome the body’s defenses to cause an infection — including one that could be a master regulator of a set of virulence genes. The majority of the identified genes have readily recognizable counterparts in
M. tuberculosis.
