Christopher Schulman

Abstract:

Parasitoid wasps must infect host organisms with their eggs to complete their life cycle. Ganaspis hookeri is a parasitoid wasp that can reproduce in many host organisms, including the model organism, Drosophila melanogaster. Upon Infection, the host organism undergoes metabolic changes that help to fight the infection. In contrast, the wasp also injects venom that counters the host immune response leading to the egg development and an adult wasp emerging from the larvae. One goal of our research is to identify specific metabolites that change upon infection. MALDI spatial imaging is a technique that allows us to identify where in the fly larvae metabolic changes are occurring. We are developing techniques to allow MALDI spatial imaging on Drosophila larvae. We also hypothesize that glucose utilization plays a role in the immune response. We know that there are eight glycolytic enzymes among the 168 venom proteins and we would like to determine their abundance. As a first step we have carried out one dimensional SDS-PAGE to separate G. hookeri venom proteins and used LC-MS/MS to identify those proteins.Ultimately we would like to determine the abundance of venom proteins to help solidify our understanding of wasp/host interplay.