Drosophila infected by green fluorescent bacteria.
Red-eyed flies lacking antimicrobial peptides are
susceptible to infection, while white-eyed flies with
antimicrobial peptides resist infection.
At the interface of host-pathogen interactions
I study how the host immune system interacts with parasites and pathogens. My research has typically focused on the function of antimicrobial peptides, short microbicidal molecules that kill invading natural enemies. I am interested in how these molecules are regulated at the signalling level, and how they interact with diverse natural enemies. Using Drosophila genetics and an evolutionary approach, I aim to describe how the wealth of knowledge of the Drosophila immune response translates to other animals, including economically-important insects and arthropods, and even to the human immune repertoire.
I study how the host immune system interacts with parasites and pathogens. My research has typically focused on the function of antimicrobial peptides, short microbicidal molecules that kill invading natural enemies. I am interested in how these molecules are regulated at the signalling level, and how they interact with diverse natural enemies. Using Drosophila genetics and an evolutionary approach, I aim to describe how the wealth of knowledge of the Drosophila immune response translates to other animals, including economically-important insects and arthropods, and even to the human immune repertoire.
This is Mark A. Hanson's research page. I previously did my PhD in Dr. Bruno Lemaitre's lab at l'École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), in Lausanne Switzerland. I am currently a Research Associate in Dr. Ben Longdon's lab at the University of Exeter, Penryn, UK funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF). The lab investigates how infection dynamics differ across species, with a previous focus on viruses. My current work will complement the lab's existing interests by characterizing how immune signalling differences evolve across species. To do this, I will be doing infections across species with diverse immune eliciting microbes and looking at how activation of immune pathways behaves across species. With the powerful genetic tools developed in Drosophila fruit flies, I hope to take those lessons and functionally test typically hard-to-do experiments to validate why differences across species occur, and inform on how we can better predict when immune signalling will be similar or different across species. This work is particularly topical in the light of zoonotic pandemics, which you... may have heard about over the last few years.
