Lauren Atkinson

Chlamydia is an obligate intracellular bacterium that is the most frequent bacterial sexually transmitted infection and the most common cause of infectious blindness worldwide. Chlamydia has a highly reduced and conserved genome with limited metabolic and biosynthetic capabilities. Instead, it manipulates the host cell to acquire amino acids, ATP, and various metabolites. Identifying and characterizing the critical components of its metabolism will enable a better understanding of its basic biology as well as provide potential targets for novel antibiotics. Chlamydia has eliminated the first step in glycolysis (glucose to glucose-6-phosphate; G6P) through active transport of G6P. The next step is the conversion of G6P into fructose-6-phosphate by phosphoglucose isomerase (pgi). Surprisingly, deletion of this key glycolytic enzyme has little effect on growth and infectious processes. This supports that alternate ‘shunt’ pathways, such as the pentose phosphate pathway (PPP), are more critical to central metabolism in Chlamydia. In addition, different mutagenesis studies have repeatedly yielded disruptions to the glycolytic pathway and the truncated TCA cycle of Chlamydia. However, to date no deletion mutants have successfully been obtained within the PPP to our knowledge. The goal of my research is to understand what role the PPP plays in Chlamydia biology as well as to probe the contributions of other metabolic pathways.