Filomena Perrone
PhD Studentship, Università della Campania “Luigi Vanvitelli”, Italy
I am interested in gene regulation in mycobacteria, and I joined the TB group at The Wellcome Trust Brighton and Sussex Centre for Global Health Research to expand my expertise working with Mycobacterium tuberculosis. My project, characterising the function of a tetR-transcriptional regulator in M.smegmatis and M.tb, is a collaboration between the WTBSCGHR, Royal Veterinary College and Università della Campania “Luigi Vanvitelli”. I have developed fluorescent reporter constructs and used RNA profiling to map the expression pattern and regulon of a transcriptional regulator that is hypothesised to be important for mycobacteria to survive inside macrophages – a key step in the pathogenesis of M.tb. I will continue this work to expand our understanding of host-M.tb interactions, and to hopefully find new strategies to treat tuberculosis. I have shown posters of my work at European and UK microbiology conferences.