Closing in on Cholera
A discovery holds promise for preventing a widespread disease.
Posted on February 10th, 2015 – Article by Lee Sherman
In the life of Bo Park, there’s a quirky connection between her early childhood in South Korea and her pharmacology research at Oregon State University: fish.
In the city of Incheon where she was born, her mom and dad sold hot bowls of fishcake soup from the food truck they owned and operated. As a pre-pharmacy student in Corvallis, Park studied fish collagen as a nutrient source for Vibrio cholerae, the bacterium that causes cholera. She performed laborious two-week-long procedures to obtain pure collagen from the skins of fresh trout she bought from the seafood case at WinCo.
A big question under investigation in Professor Sikora’s lab is, What keeps cholera pathogens alive in rivers and streams where they can infect humans who drink the water or eat the fish? Park’s discovery that a protein call VchC, secreted by V. cholerae, degrades fish collagen opens up an important new avenue of investigation in the study of cholera, an often-deadly infectious disease that afflicts millions every year, mostly in developing countries of Africa, Asia and other regions hit by natural disasters, wars and climate disruption.
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