Research in my lab focuses on the prion disease chronic wasting disease, or CWD, that is endemic in deer and elk in our region. CWD is infectious to deer, elk and moose. It is a progressive disease, invariably fatal, and characterized in late stages by neurodegenerative and spongiform changes in the central nervous system. Like other prion diseases, it is also characterized by the propagation and accumulation in certain tissues of an aggregated form of a normal host cell protein (PrP).

I am interested in determining how genetic differences that we have observed in this protein can be associated with a higher or lower prevalence of CWD infection in wild deer and elk, and with a much slower disease course in experimentally infected captive animals. As a tool in studying the molecular mechanisms of these effects, we have cloned and expressed recombinant forms of the two species-specific alleles of the PrP protein from genomes of mule deer, elk, moose, and white-tailed deer. In collaboration with researchers in the Department of Chemistry we are developing the use of MALDI-TOF discrimination of the allelic forms present in different tissues of infected and uninfected animals; we are collaborating with researchers at Colorado State University on an in vitro assay using the recombinant proteins to study effects of specific mutations.

In other projects we study the susceptibility of domestic sheep and of cattle to chronic wasting disease; characterizing disease-associated prion protein in cardiac muscle of CWD-infected cervids; the genetic variability in PrP protein among North American wild ruminants, and the role of the follicular dendritic cells of tonsil in early infection of deer and elk with CWD. In collaboration with Dr. James Rose, Professor Emeritus, University of Wyoming, we are also producing a mule deer brain atlas.