Jilarie A. Santos Santiago
My name is Jilarie A. Santos Santiago and I am originally from Carolina, Puerto Rico. I attended the University of Puerto Rico, Humacao campus where I obtained my bachelor’s degree in General Biology.
Since I was little I was a curious about everything. I always asked “too many” questions and wanted to know what happened inside animals, cells or inanimate objects. During my time in high school I decided that the ideal profession for me was to be a physician. As an undergraduate student, I started looking for extracurricular opportunities that would help me become familiar with the environment in hospitals. I joined the Pathology Laboratory at the Veteran Affairs Hospital in San Juan, Puerto Rico. There, I learned about tissues, histology and the importance of understanding cellular and molecular events in decision making from physicians, but also discovered a professional career more aligned with my innate curiosity, research. That was the first experience that led me to conclude that research was the ideal career for me. Is the profession that will allow me to go from one question to another. Is the perfect environment to contribute knowledge to society and making cutting edge discoveries.
The area of research that I am most interested include infectious diseases related to the microbiome and the host-pathogen interaction in the gut.
By the time I graduated, I was sure I wanted to pursue a PhD, but I felt I did not have enough research experience. I wanted to be immersed in the environment to which I wanted to commit in the long term. To have the opportunity to be part of the development of a project and to continue developing my critical thinking and decision making skills. I was looking for a program that would help me strengthen my base as a scientist. The PREP@UGA provided me with all these opportunities. In addition to this, it is an excellent program to discover your interests and have a smoother transition to graduate school.
Communication is one of the most important features of the scientific community. Communicating your results and research effectively is crucial. I hope to get from PREP@UGA the necessary tools to share my effectively to scientific and non-scientific communities.
This year I will be in the laboratory of Dr. Steve Hajduk and my mentor will be Dr. Michael Cipriano.
In Dr. Hajduk’s lab we work on Trypanosoma brucei, a protozoan parasite that infects mammals. Subspecies of T. brucei, like T. brucei gambiense and T. brucei rhodesiense, cause human Trypanosomiasis, more commonly known as African sleeping sickness. Trypanosoma brucei is the causative agent of Nagana disease in cattle. Various organisms, including bacteria and eukaryotic, including these parasites, produce small membrane bound vesicles, also known as extracellular vesicles (EVs). Proposed roles for EVs include transfer of drug resistance, growth regulation, quorum sensing, immune regulation, developmental regulation and neurotransmission. Trypanosomes are transmitted through the tsetse fly. When these parasites are in the bloodstream of the infected mammal, they differentiate from a proliferative (long-slender) to a non-proliferative (short-stumpy) stage. This differentiation is mediated by SIF, the stumpy induction factor. The identity of SIF is yet to be determined, but recent publications suggest that oligopeptides produced by peptidases can be internalized by long-slender through a transmembrane receptor, and is this internalization that leads to differentiation.
My role in Dr. Hajduk’s laboratory is to determine if EVs play a role in this differentiation. I seek to verify whether EVs carry enzymatically active proteases derived from the parasite that can provide these oligopeptides or if EVs provide the substrate to host-derived proteases.
The techniques I have used include cell culture, nucleic acid isolation and sequencing from parasite derived EVs, molecular cloning, Mass Spectrometry, proteomic analysis, vesicle quantification, among others.