Cheryl Ingram-Smith
Clemson University, SC·Microbiology & Immunology
Entamoeba histolytica is a single-celled intestinal parasite that causes amoebic dysentery in roughly 100 million people a year, with as many as a billion infections annually since only about one in ten becomes symptomatic. Its spread depends on switching between two forms: a crawling, tissue-invading trophozoite and a tough, transmissible cyst.
- Fields
Microbiology & Immunology
Biology
- Topics
Entamoeba histolytica
Entamoeba invadens
amebiasis
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Dec 2026
What they work on
- Raise the efficiency with which standard laboratory-produced Entamoeba histolytica cysts undergo excystation, the conversion back into motile trophozoites, by systematically testing triggering conditions.
- Produce E. histolytica cysts predisposed to excyst at high efficiency by varying the encystation conditions used to generate them in culture.
- Apply both approaches iteratively to identify the combination of encystation and excystation conditions giving reproducible, high-efficiency conversion, yielding a laboratory model of the full parasite life cycle.
More about the research
Converting into a cyst is encystation; breaking back out of one is excystation. Both steps are attractive drug targets, yet neither has been studied in the human parasite itself, because nobody could make its cysts in culture. Researchers instead worked with Entamoeba invadens, a distantly related reptile parasite. The broader question driving this program is how E. histolytica senses and adapts to the different environments it meets during infection.
Why it matters
Amoebic dysentery remains a major public health burden in many developing countries, and transmission runs entirely through the cyst stage. A reliable laboratory method for making human-pathogen cysts reactivate would let researchers find the genes that stage requires, which could point toward interventions aimed specifically at blocking transmission.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Christian Tschudi
Yale University, CT·Microbiology & Immunology
Determine how T. brucei parasites receive the signal to begin making the metacyclic VSG (mVSG) coat that lets them infect mammals, using parasites induced to develop by switching on the RNA-binding protein RBP6.
Luther Bartelt
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, NC·Microbiology & Immunology
Test whether purified recombinant Giardia proteases, protein-cutting enzymes secreted by intestinal trophozoites, damage the gut barrier using intestinal epithelial cell monolayers and primary mouse-derived intestinal cells, and whether anti-secretome antibodies block that damage.
Rabindra Mandal
CUNY Hunter College, NY·Microbiology & Immunology
Determine how the makeup of the gut bacterial community affects intestinal levels of sphingosine 1-phosphate (S1P), a lipid signaling molecule, and how those levels track with parasite burden in mice infected with Plasmodium yoelii 17XNL.
The school
Clemson University: 19 labs on PI Pages, $339M a year on research, 297 research doctorates a year.
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