Kasturi
Haldar, PhD
Professor
Pathology and Microbiology-Immunology
To Contact Dr. Haldar:
phone: 312-503-0224
e-mail: k-haldar@northwestern.edu
Dr. Haldar's website
PubMed
Reference Lookup
Research Interests
Dr. Kasturi
Haldar’s research focuses on the regulation of pathogenic vacuoles.
The secretory pathway delivers proteins and lipids to organelles to support
the growth of their membranes in a eukaryotic cell. Her interests lie in studying
how this pathway interacts with vacuoles of intracellular pathogens. Over
the past ten years, Dr. Haldar’s laboratory has investigated the human
malaria parasite Plasmodium falciparum, a protozoan which invades and develops
in red blood cells. Recently, they have also begun studying how the secretory
and endo-vacuolar pathways of epithelial cells and macrophages move proteins
and lipids to vacuoles of pathogens such as Salmonella, Mycobacteria, Chlamydia
and Toxoplasma. Dr. Haldar’s long-term objectives are to understand
the common principles of vacuolar biogenesis of emerging and re-emerging infections.
The central questions
in the malaria research focus on two unique secretory organelles. The first
is a vacuolar network of tubovesicular membranes that provides nutrients to
the parasite. The second is an ‘apicoplast’ that is a secondary
endosymbiont and relic chloroplast which nonetheless retains its plastid genome.
Dr. Haldar’s laboratory
is also interested in microbial genes that regulate the trafficking/signaling
of vacuoles containing pathogens such as Salmonella, Chlamydia, Mycobacteria
and Toxoplasma in mammalian epithelial cells and/or macrophages. For all of
these pathogens they use emerging genetic techniques in the development of
functional assays to exploit the wealth of information that has emerged from
genomics studies. To this end, they ‘mine’ databases for functional
motifs for unique organelles, develop high throughput assays and use microarrays
to track global changes in secretory gene expression during intracellular
pathogen development.
The work should define unique and fundamental secretory mechanisms exploited by diverse micro-organisms, that may provide new targets for immunological prophylaxis and/or chemotherapy.