Anthony Maurelli
University of Florida, FL·Public Health & Epidemiology
Shigellosis, also called bacillary dysentery, is a diarrheal disease caused by Shigella bacteria. Infections range from mild or symptom-free to severe bloody diarrhea, so many people never seek care and reported case counts badly underestimate how common the disease is.
- Fields
Public Health & Epidemiology
Microbiology & Immunology
Earth & Environmental Science
- Topics
Shigella
shigellosis
bacillary dysentery
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Jan 2028
What they work on
- Develop and validate sensitive, specific and reproducible digital PCR methods for detecting Shigella species in wastewater, optimizing extraction using authentic and synthetic wastewater spiked with lab-grown strains.
- Validate molecular targets that differentiate S. flexneri from S. sonnei in wastewater, and culture Shigella from wastewater to assess antibiotic resistance genotypes and phenotypes.
- Measure community-scale Shigella prevalence by sampling at the wastewater treatment plant intake, using wastewater flow rate as a marker to normalize for the contributing population.
- Extend shigellosis surveillance to building scale in high-risk congregate pediatric populations such as day care centers, and provide the data to the local health department.
More about the research
Antibiotic resistance has made the problem worse, and in the United States, Europe and other developed countries shigellosis is also transmitted sexually, with outbreaks driven by resistant strains of S. flexneri among men who have sex with men. Testing sewage instead of patients offers a way to see infections that case reporting misses.
Why it matters
Because sewage testing does not depend on whether sick people seek care, it could reveal hidden shigellosis burden and resistant strains that case reports miss. Local health departments could use the resulting data to target interventions at specific neighborhoods or buildings such as day care centers, and the approach could become a template for surveillance of other underreported bacterial infections.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Marcela Pasetti
University of Maryland, Baltimore, MD·Microbiology & Immunology
Optimize process development, formulation and scale-up of two-strain O-polysaccharide conjugates in which Shigella sugar is linked to IpaB, an invasion protein shared across Shigella species, made by cell-free protein expression.
Fuqing Wu
University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston, TX·Public Health & Epidemiology
Build models that connect how virus levels change inside one infected person with how the virus passes between people, so that SARS-CoV-2 levels in wastewater can be read as measures of community transmission.
Shelley Payne
University of Texas at Austin, TX·Microbiology & Immunology
Determine how carbon-source availability tells Shigella flexneri where it is in the host, by testing mutants defective in specific carbon metabolism pathways for invasion, intracellular replication, and cell-to-cell spread in human cells.
The school
University of Florida: 65 labs on PI Pages, $1.3B a year on research, 795 research doctorates a year.
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