MbShea@PWP@English@UMCP

Title: Leishmania major and Leishmania mexicana: A Statistical Comparison and Analysis of the Infection Process

Abstract:
Leishmania parasites are found in the gut of the sandfly living in the tropics, subtropics, and Southern Europe. Leishmania are able to enter the bloodstream, take residence in the host macrophage, and escape killing by the macrophage the entire time they reside there. This process is not thoroughly understood. Through previous work done in the El-Sayed lab looking at transcriptomes, Leishmania major and the host macrophage genome were found to have a great deal of differential gene expression activity-several genes are up or downregulated-up to 4 hours post infection, with only normal regulatory activities occurring after this period. A good deal of attention has been given to the genes that are differentially regulated in those four hours--while many of them are well studied, regulatory proteins, others are novel and uncharacterized. Understanding those uncharacterized proteins could be key to determining how the parasite survives within the host cell and are imperative to eventually combat L. major infection. However, different species of Leishmania do differ in several ways. These differences could lead to some different proteins being differentially expressed in that time period. Thus, we will compare our results with those of another lab, who did the same experiments using L. mexicana, another strain of Leishmania. Using several bioinformatic and statistical methods to map RNA-seq reads onto the respective genomes, compute differential expression patterns and carry out a variety of pathway enrichment analyses, we will yield insights into the biology of the parasite as it establishes its infection and survives within the mammalian host, with the goal of identifying potential drug targets.

Reader's profile: an academic who is comfortable with understanding more technical biology terms, but still needs some background on this subfield of research in particular

Reader's response: This is likely interesting and very useful work, has a lot of potential for a great outcome, and is low risk. Only potential problem is if the analyses don't produce any fruitful results, but that information is still useful and makes clear that this is one less path to be explored.

REVISED THESIS OR PROBLEM STATEMENT: I am just submitting my audience analysis so I haven't received feedback to revise yet!
VOICE: Same as above, I haven't revised yet; but alternating between first and third person. If first person, it will be in a highly academic tone.
CITATION: MLA, with in text parenthetical citations.

M,

Is MLA the citation standard in genomics? I think some version of author-date is more likely.

You can move between first and third person, if this is a pattern in the documents of your lab. I would model after these colleagues.