Heitman Lab Members

Camille Semighini , PhD Post-Doctoral Fellow 312 CARL Building Box 3546 DUMC Durham, N.C. 27710 Phone: 919.684.9702 Fax: 919.684.5458 Email:cs191@notes.duke.edu

I am originally from Brazil, where I completed my B.S. degree in Pharmacy and Biochemistry and my M.Sc. in Molecular and Cell Biology at the University of Sao Paulo (USP). I moved to the US to obtain a Ph.D. degree at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, and the focus of my work was the fungal DNA damage response and programmed cell death.

Apoptosis is a form of programmed cell death that eliminates deleterious cells and is critical for development and homeostasis in multicellular organisms. Apoptotic-like cell death has been described in several fungi and is induced by different compounds and stress conditions. Cryptococcus neoformans has been reported to undergo apoptosis in response to co-culture with bacteria and to hydrogen peroxide. Conversely, capsular polysaccharides from C. neoformans are known to induce apoptosis in host immune cells, contributing to its virulence.

It seems counterintuitive that an organism would both induce and undergo apoptosis in response to different signals, but it strongly indicates that the apoptotic machinery in C. neoformans has to be divergent enough from the host’s in order to avoid its inappropriate activation in the context of pathogenicity. Hence, my objectives are to elucidate the apoptotic-signaling cascade in C. neoformans, to characterize its unique features when compared to the human machinery and to investigate their suitability to be specifically targeted as a novel antifungal strategy.

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