Aoife Heaslip

Congrats to all on their success! Wishing you all a happy holiday and a great 2025.

Bending stiffness of Toxoplasma gondii actin filaments Actin is essential for the survival and pathogenicity of the Apicomplexan parasite Toxoplasma gondii, where it plays essential functions in cargo transport, invasion, egress, and organelle inheritance. Recent work has shown that, unlike vertebrate skeletal muscle actin, purified T. gondii actin filaments (TgAct1) can undergo rapid treadmilling, due to large differences in the barbed- and pointed-end critical concentrations, rapid subunit dissociation from filament ends, and a rapid nucleotide exchange rate constant from free monomers.

Tom finished out the year with another publication, where he looked at the bending stiffness of Toxoplasma actin filaments.
www.jbc.org/article/S002...

Also in October, Mike presented his work at ASTMH Annual Meeting in New Orleans

In October, undergrad Victoria Yi presented her work at the UConn Fall Frontiers Research Symposium

In July, postdoc Nick Hilton joined the lab. Welcome Nick! He is a brave soul who is tackling projects on both the cell bio and biophysics sides of the lab. Watch this space in 2025! 😊

Camille won a prize for her excellent poster!

Jacob gave a fantastic talk

In May Aoife, Jacob and Camille went to Germany for the International Congress on Toxoplasmosis.

In April, Aoife was awarded tenure at UConn

Myosin F controls actin organization and dynamics in Toxoplasma gondii | Molecular Biology of the Cell Intracellular cargo transport is a ubiquitous cellular process in all eukaryotes. In many cell types, membrane bound cargo is associated with molecular motors which transport cargo along microtubule a...

Later that week, Jacob’s paper was accepted to MBoC – Jacob show that a novel myosin motor is involved in actin organization in Toxoplasma
www.molbiolcell.org/doi/10.1091/...

Toxoplasma gondii actin filaments are tuned for rapid disassembly and turnover - Nature Communications Actin is critical to the survival of the parasite Toxoplasma gondii. In this study, Hvorecny and Sladewski et al. show that T. gondii actin forms intrinsically dynamic filaments in vitro due to differ...

In March, Tom’s paper on Toxoplasma actin dynamics was published in Nature Communications. This was a great collaboration between the Heaslip Lab and the Kollman Lab at UofWashington
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

In January two new students joined our group – Josh Berthiaume is a Ph.D student and Lee Dollar is a M.S student. They’ve already made great contributions and I’m excited to see where their projects go in 2025.

Before 2024 comes to a close, I want to celebrate the achievements of the folks in the lab. Here is the Heaslip Lab “Year in Review”