Mark Achtman | |
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 Mark Achtman in 2015, portrait via the Royal Society | |
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| Thesis | A Genetic Study of the F-Factor (1969) |
| Website | www2 |
Mark Achtman FRS [1] is Professor of Bacterial Population Genetics at Warwick Medical School, part of the University of Warwick in the UK. [2] [3] [4] [5]
Achtman was educated at the University of Manitoba where he was awarded a Master of Science degree in 1965 for research on hemagglutination in adenovirus. [6] He went on to complete a PhD on bacterial fertility factor at the University of California, Berkeley in 1969. [7] [8]
Achtman's research interests are in the population genetics of pathogenic bacteria such as Vibrio cholerae , [9] Salmonella , [10] [11] Yersinia pestis , [12] [13] Neisseria meningitidis , [14] Escherichia coli , [8] Helicobacter pylori , [15] and Bordetella . [16] Achtman was one of the inventors of multilocus sequence typing. [17] His research has been funded by the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC) and Medical Research Council (MRC). [18]
Achtman was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 2015. His nomination reads: [1]
Mark Achtman co-pioneered the development of bacterial population genetics and carried out influential studies characterising strains associated with epidemics of meningococcal disease in Africa. He has undertaken remarkable and highly innovative studies on the human gut pathogen, Helicobacter pylori, showing its ancient association with humans and the ability of genetic studies of this pathogen to complement linguistic and human genetic studies to trace the ancient migrations of its human host. He has also carried out elegant and incisive genetic studies of Yersinia pestis to explore the origins and spread of plague pandemics.
Yersinia pestis is a gram-negative, non-motile, coccobacillus bacterium without spores that is related to both Yersinia enterocolitica and Yersinia pseudotuberculosis, the pathogen from which Y. pestis evolved and responsible for the Far East scarlet-like fever. It is a facultative anaerobic organism that can infect humans via the Oriental rat flea. It causes the disease plague, which caused the Plague of Justinian and the Black Death, the deadliest pandemic in recorded history. Plague takes three main forms: pneumonic, septicemic, and bubonic. Yersinia pestis is a parasite of its host, the rat flea, which is also a parasite of rats, hence Y. pestis is a hyperparasite.
Salmonella is a genus of rod-shaped (bacillus) gram-negative bacteria of the family Enterobacteriaceae. The two known species of Salmonella are Salmonella enterica and Salmonella bongori. S. enterica is the type species and is further divided into six subspecies that include over 2,650 serotypes. Salmonella was named after Daniel Elmer Salmon (1850–1914), an American veterinary surgeon.
Helicobacter pylori, previously known as Campylobacter pylori, is a gram-negative, flagellated, helical bacterium. Mutants can have a rod or curved rod shape, and these are less effective. Its helical body is thought to have evolved in order to penetrate the mucous lining of the stomach, helped by its flagella, and thereby establish infection. The bacterium was first identified as the causal agent of gastric ulcers in 1983 by the Australian doctors Barry Marshall and Robin Warren.
Carcinogenesis, also called oncogenesis or tumorigenesis, is the formation of a cancer, whereby normal cells are transformed into cancer cells. The process is characterized by changes at the cellular, genetic, and epigenetic levels and abnormal cell division. Cell division is a physiological process that occurs in almost all tissues and under a variety of circumstances. Normally, the balance between proliferation and programmed cell death, in the form of apoptosis, is maintained to ensure the integrity of tissues and organs. According to the prevailing accepted theory of carcinogenesis, the somatic mutation theory, mutations in DNA and epimutations that lead to cancer disrupt these orderly processes by interfering with the programming regulating the processes, upsetting the normal balance between proliferation and cell death. This results in uncontrolled cell division and the evolution of those cells by natural selection in the body. Only certain mutations lead to cancer whereas the majority of mutations do not.
Recombineering is a genetic and molecular biology technique based on homologous recombination systems, as opposed to the older/more common method of using restriction enzymes and ligases to combine DNA sequences in a specified order. Recombineering is widely used for bacterial genetics, in the generation of target vectors for making a conditional mouse knockout, and for modifying DNA of any source often contained on a bacterial artificial chromosome (BAC), among other applications.
This is a timeline of the events relating to the discovery that peptic ulcer disease and some cancers are caused by H. pylori. In 2005, Barry Marshall and Robin Warren were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their discovery that peptic ulcer disease (PUD) was primarily caused by Helicobacter pylori, a bacterium with affinity for acidic environments, such as the stomach. As a result, PUD that is associated with H. pylori is currently treated with antibiotics used to eradicate the infection. For decades prior to their discovery, it was widely believed that PUD was caused by excess acid in the stomach. During this time, acid control was the primary method of treatment for PUD, to only partial success. Among other effects, it is now known that acid suppression alters the stomach milieu to make it less amenable to H. pylori infection.
Roxana Moslehi is an Iranian-born genetic epidemiologist.
The AB5 toxins are six-component protein complexes secreted by certain pathogenic bacteria known to cause human diseases such as cholera, dysentery, and hemolytic–uremic syndrome. One component is known as the A subunit, and the remaining five components are B subunits. All of these toxins share a similar structure and mechanism for entering targeted host cells. The B subunit is responsible for binding to receptors to open up a pathway for the A subunit to enter the cell. The A subunit is then able to use its catalytic machinery to take over the host cell's regular functions.
Cancer bacteria are bacteria infectious organisms that are known or suspected to cause cancer. While cancer-associated bacteria have long been considered to be opportunistic, there is some evidence that bacteria may be directly carcinogenic. Evidence has shown that a specific stage in cancer can be associated with bacteria that is pathogenic. The strongest evidence to date involves the bacterium H. pylori and its role in gastric cancer.
Helicobacter pylori eradication protocols is a standard name for all treatment protocols for peptic ulcers and gastritis in the presence of Helicobacter pylori infection. The primary goal of the treatment is not only temporary relief of symptoms but also total elimination of H. pylori infection. Patients with active duodenal or gastric ulcers and those with a prior ulcer history should be tested for H. pylori. Appropriate therapy should be given for eradication. Patients with MALT lymphoma should also be tested and treated for H. pylori since eradication of this infection can induce remission in many patients when the tumor is limited to the stomach. Several consensus conferences, including the Maastricht Consensus Report, recommend testing and treating several other groups of patients but there is limited evidence of benefit. This includes patients diagnosed with gastric adenocarcinoma, patients found to have atrophic gastritis or intestinal metaplasia, as well as first-degree relatives of patients with gastric adenocarcinoma since the relatives themselves are at increased risk of gastric cancer partly due to the intrafamilial transmission of H. pylori. To date, it remains controversial whether to test and treat all patients with functional dyspepsia, gastroesophageal reflux disease, or other non-GI disorders as well as asymptomatic individuals.
Pathogenomics is a field which uses high-throughput screening technology and bioinformatics to study encoded microbe resistance, as well as virulence factors (VFs), which enable a microorganism to infect a host and possibly cause disease. This includes studying genomes of pathogens which cannot be cultured outside of a host. In the past, researchers and medical professionals found it difficult to study and understand pathogenic traits of infectious organisms. With newer technology, pathogen genomes can be identified and sequenced in a much shorter time and at a lower cost, thus improving the ability to diagnose, treat, and even predict and prevent pathogenic infections and disease. It has also allowed researchers to better understand genome evolution events - gene loss, gain, duplication, rearrangement - and how those events impact pathogen resistance and ability to cause disease. This influx of information has created a need for bioinformatics tools and databases to analyze and make the vast amounts of data accessible to researchers, and it has raised ethical questions about the wisdom of reconstructing previously extinct and deadly pathogens in order to better understand virulence.
Rauchvirus is a genus of viruses in the order Caudovirales, in the family Podoviridae. Bacteria serve as natural hosts. The genus contains only one species: Bordetella virus BPP1.
Estimates place the worldwide risk of cancers from infectious causes at 16.1%. Viral infections are risk factors for cervical cancer, 80% of liver cancers, and 15–20% of the other cancers. This proportion varies in different regions of the world from a high of 32.7% in Sub-Saharan Africa to 3.3% in Australia and New Zealand.
Gordon Dougan is a Professor in the Department of Medicine at the University of Cambridge and head of pathogen research and a member of the board of management at the Wellcome Sanger Institute in Cambridge, United Kingdom. He is also a Fellow of Wolfson College, Cambridge. During his career, Dougan has pioneered work on enteric diseases and been heavily involved in the movement to improve vaccine usage in developing countries. In this regard he was recently voted as one of the top ten most influential people in the vaccine world by people working in the area.
Helicobacter acinonychis is a bacterium in the Helicobacteraceae family, Campylobacterales order. It was first isolated from cheetahs with gastritis, so has been associated with this disease in this particular species and others of its kind. It is Gram-negative, spiral-shaped, and grows under microaerophilic conditions. The type strain is 90-119.
Julian Parkhill is Professor of Bacterial Evolution in the Department of Veterinary Medicine at the University of Cambridge. He previously served as head of pathogen genomics at the Wellcome Sanger Institute.
Duncan John Maskell, is a British and Australian biochemist, academic, and academic administrator, who specialises in molecular microbiology and bacterial infectious diseases. Since 2018, he has been Vice-Chancellor of the University of Melbourne, Australia but retires in 2025. He previously taught at the University of Cambridge, England.
Ancientpathogengenomics is a scientific field related to the study of pathogen genomes recovered from ancient human, plant or animal remains. Ancient pathogens are microorganisms, now extinct, that in the past centuries caused several epidemics and deaths worldwide. Their genome, referred to as ancient DNA (aDNA), is isolated from the burial's remains of victims of the pandemics caused by these pathogens.
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