AUSTIN COLLEGE

DEPARTMENT OF BIOLOGY

Kelly Reed, PhD
Associate Professor of Biology





RESEARCH INTERESTS:

My research focuses on the bacterial pathogenesis of Shigella flexneri .  This bacterium causes dysentery or bloody diarrhea.  The bacteria are ingested orally and traverse the gastrointestinal tract.  In the large intestine the bacteria invade and multiply in the colonic epithelial cells which leads to an inflammatory response which causes ulcerative lesions in the colon.  It is these lesions that results in the bloody diarrhea.  The disease caused by Shigella is limited to primates.  Therefore, much of what is known about the Shigella infection process has been determined in tissue culture cells (human cells grown in petri plates).  My research has shown that Shigella grown in the presence of deoxycholate (a bile salt) are more efficient at attaching to tissue culture cells than bacteria grown in the absence of this bile salt.  I refer to this phenomenon as deoxycholate enhanced attachment.  There is an Escherichia coli virotype called enteroinvasive E. coli (EIEC) that causes a disease very similar to Shigella.  One of the major differences in pathogenesis between these organisms is that the infective dose (the number of organisms that need to be ingested to cause disease) for Shigella is approximately 100 while the infective dose for EIEC is a million.  Interestingly, the EIEC strains do not exhibit deoxycholate enhanced attachment which may be one reason for the difference in infective dose between Shigella and EIEC.  My current research efforts are focused on identifying the genes required for deoxycholate enhanced attachment in Shigella and to determine why EIEC is unable to exhibit this effect.


COURSES TAUGHT (2002-2003):

FALL SPRING

Last modified: October 28, 2002

Kelly Reed (kreed@austincollege.edu)
Biology Department Faculty & Staff Revised Curriculum Field Reserves Research