Genetics of Infectious Disease

Infectious diseases are a leading cause of morbidity and mortality in humans and animals, and represent a significant cost to the public in both health care and effects on food sources. The use of vaccines and antibiotics have made significant improvements in the control of infectious agents in recent years, however, many infectious agents are recalcitrant to vaccine control and/or aquire resistance to antibiotics, making them a continuing problem worldwide. Technological advances have provided new tools with which to study infectious agents, the diseases they cause, and the hosts' responses to infection. This has resulted in a better understanding of the biology and genetics of the infectious agents which has led to better vaccines, alternative drug therapies, and more sensitive methods of detection of these agents in our environments. These methods have also led to the identification of new infectious agents of diseases which previously had no known cause. Thus, this is an exciting time in the field of biomedical and veterinary research.

The techniques of biochemistry, microbiology, molecular biology, and genomics, are used by a group of researchers in the Genetics Program at MSU to study viral, bacterial, and parasitic infectious agents and the diseases they cause. These agents include food- and water-borne agents, sexually-transmitted organisms, and respiratory pathogens of humans and animals. Technological resources available in the MSU community allow these researchers to be on the cutting edge of advancing our knowledge of the infection process.