![\"\"](\"https:\/\/news.utoledo.edu\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/02\/Dr.-Matson.jpg\")
<\/a>Matson<\/p><\/div>\n
Matson, a cholera researcher and associate professor of medical microbiology and immunology at The University of Toledo, knew she couldn\u2019t have high school students working with her epidemic-causing bacteria of choice. Instead, she hoped she might find other harmless organisms from the genus Vibrio, sort of bacterial cousins to Vibrio cholerae, varieties of which cause the disease cholera.<\/p>\n
When the lab results came back, she couldn\u2019t quite believe what she was seeing.<\/p>\n
By pure accident, Matson had discovered Vibrio cholerae in the Maumee River and Lake Erie.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt was totally unexpected,\u201d Matson said. \u201cInitially I worried the samples had somehow become contaminated from our lab strains, as Vibrio cholerae typically is found in coastal or brackish waters. It is rarely found in freshwater, especially in areas with winters as cold as Toledo.\u201d<\/p>\n
After testing and retesting, her discovery was confirmed and outlined in a 2020 paper published in the journal PLOS One<\/a>.<\/p>\n Importantly, careful analysis of the cholera strains Matson found confirmed they are not the same as those that cause the disease cholera, which leads to tens of thousands of deaths worldwide each year.<\/p>\n \u201cI want to be very clear that by no means should anyone be panicking about this,\u201d she said. \u201cIt\u2019s possible these strains could cause mild diarrhea, gastroenteritis or wound infections, but they are not the same bacteria as those that cause cholera. These bacteria are not something that\u2019s going to cause serious disease, but it\u2019s important to know they are there from a public health perspective.\u201d<\/p>\n Matson has studied cholera for nearly two decades, with much of her research focused on the bacteria\u2019s stress response \u2014 essentially how it senses and reacts to potentially harmful changes in its environment.<\/p>\n She recently received a three-year, $800,000 grant from the National Science Foundation to build on prior research that characterized a new protein pathway in cholera that is essential for ensuring its survival in the face of several stressors, including antimicrobial peptides.<\/p>\n Antimicrobial peptides are produced as part of the innate immune response of organisms ranging from other bacteria to humans. Knowing how the newly discovered pathway neutralizes or otherwise rids cholera of those peptides is important in our overall understanding of the bacteria and could also provide clues about how to kill it more effectively.<\/p>\n \u201cIf we understand these basic mechanisms, it might lead to ways we can target that pathway and knock it out or inhibit it in some way,\u201d she said. \u201cBasic knowledge is at the core of all your fundamental medical discoveries, and you don\u2019t necessarily know what you\u2019re going to be using it for.\u201d<\/p>\n The NSF grant also will support the training of a Ph.D. student who is interested in science education, as well as a program for high school students to get involved with research on other, non-virulent members of the Vibrio genus.<\/p>\n Matson also continues to work through sequencing the cholera strains found in Lake Erie and the Maumee River in hopes of addressing unanswered questions about their potential for pathogenesis, origin, antibacterial resistance and more.<\/p>\n Of the 13 isolates her team identified only three were fully susceptible to a panel of eight common antibiotics.<\/p>\n One particularly noteworthy question is whether northwest Ohio\u2019s cholera is an outlier or something that simply has not been found elsewhere because no one has ever gone looking. Matson suspects it\u2019s the latter.<\/p>\n Though she had set off looking for other members of the Vibrio family, she realized after the fact that few aside from Vibrio cholerae were able to survive in fresh water.<\/p>\n \u201cI was basically looking for cholera, whether I wanted to or not. A lot of times when you think you know the answer you actually don\u2019t, but the biology answers it for you,\u201d she said. \u201cWe\u2019re still learning about the water in our backyard and maybe we should keep looking for things we weren\u2019t expecting.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" While not the same strains that cause disease, Dr. Jyl Matson’s surprising discovery of Vibrio cholerae in the Maumee River and Lake Erie raises intriguing questions.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":849,"featured_media":71717,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[50,38,1,3,7],"tags":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.utoledo.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/71713"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.utoledo.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.utoledo.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.utoledo.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/849"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.utoledo.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=71713"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/news.utoledo.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/71713\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":71719,"href":"https:\/\/news.utoledo.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/71713\/revisions\/71719"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.utoledo.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/71717"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.utoledo.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=71713"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.utoledo.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=71713"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.utoledo.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=71713"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}<\/a>