While completing her master’s degree in biology in York University’s Faculty of Science, Julia Gauberg spent three months in Australia trying to figure out how a particular fungus is causing the death of so many Australian green tree frogs and other amphibians around the world.
The fungal pathogen Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis (Bd) is causing the disease chytridiomycosis in amphibians worldwide, but scientists still do not know exactly how it works. Gauberg thought tight junction (TJ) proteins might play a role.
“The main concern is that Bd is obliterating amphibian species worldwide,” said Gauberg, who was supervised in the Department of Biology at York by Professor Scott Kelly. “It’s still not clear how this fungus causes so much damage.”
Gauberg is first author on the research paper “A lethal fungal pathogen directly alters tight junction proteins in the skin of a susceptible amphibian,” recently published in the Journal of Experimental Biology. The research for the paper was completed in 2017 while Gauberg was at York U. After receiving her degree at June convocation in 2018, she began her PhD at the University of Toronto.
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