Why don’t some drugs treat infection from certain type of yeast? Student looks to lipids at K-State center
When visiting a new country, lipid profiling is probably not on most people’s list of must-see-and-do activities. However, for Ashutosh Singh, a doctoral student from Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India, it is the main attraction.
Funded by an American Society of Microbiology International Fellowship, Singh came to K- State to conduct research at the Kansas Lipidomics Research Center. The $5,500 fellowship is supporting his housing and travel expenses for three months in Kansas.
Singh is using the fellowship to investigate multidrug resistance in a type of pathogenic yeast called Candida albicans, best known for causing thrush in babies and for its deadly infection of immunocompromised patients. Since one of the main functions of lipids, the building blocks of cell membranes, is to send signals to genes and proteins to control development, growth and an organism’s response to its environment, it is believed that they may play a role in Candida resistance to drugs.
Singh’s research is one example of international collaborative projects of the Kansas Lipidomics Research Center. Founded in 2003, the center collaborates with scientists across the globe. Singh has access to an array of mass spectrometers, and he says that he is receiving training from some of the world’s most knowledgeable scientists in the field of lipids and lipid analysis.