Rob Striker Lab

Welcome to the Striker Lab!

The Striker Lab has worked on multiple chronic infections but is currently focused on two areas:

1. Chronic infections can alter the normal balance of the immune system needed to work properly. Ideally the immune system needs more CD4 cells than CD8 cells, but several factors can disturb this balance and result in nonresiliant even impaired immune response to multiple infections and cancer. See the Game of T cells for details
2. About 1/3 of humanity and many warm-blooded animals have been exposed (have antibodies) to the ubiquitous single-cell protozoa called Toxoplasma gondii. This parasite can develop into cysts in the brains and hearts of warm-blooded animals and persist for decades. Current medical dogma suggests these cysts are asymptomatic unless certain very rare situations occur. Recent data though from the UKbiobank and elsewhere suggests that people who are antibody positive for T. gondii can have subtle problems with cognition and on average abnormal brain MRIs than those who have not been exposed. The connection of these findings to more serious clinical conditions such as schizophrenia and epilepsy is unclear but the Striker lab is developing biomarkers of cyst burden rather than antibody exposure to better understand this common situation.

Overview of the PknB structure with a specific competitive inhibitor.  The ligand occupies much of the ATP binding site as well as the back pocket of the kinase.