Target Audience

Des Moines University faculty, staff, and students.

Objectives

1. Compare and contrast signaling capacity in phenotypes related to in vivo survival and antifungal drug susceptibility between C. albicans and the non-pathogenic fungus Saccharomyces cerevsiae.
2. Describe the role that septins have in pathogenesis and antifungal drug susceptibility.
3. Discuss the impact of removal of the 3' untranslated region of a gene on gene expression.

Speaker

Jill Blankenship, Ph.D. 
Assistant Professor of Biology, University of Nebraska-Omaha 

Dr. Jill Blankenship has spent the last 16 years studying pathogenic fungi. In her graduate research, she studied antifungal drug targets and their roles in pathogenesis and antifungal drug susceptibility in the human pathogensCryptococcus neoformans and Candida albicans in Joe Heitman's lab at Duke University. In her postdoctoral research in labs at Columbia University and Carnegie Mellon University, Dr. Blankenship used forward genetics approaches to identify genes involved in pathogenesis and antifungal drug susceptibility. She has continued this research in her independent position, and has successfully published 16 research papers and 4 reviews on this topic.