Jack Pilgrim awarded 2022 Junior Research Parasite Award
Congratulations to Jack Pilgrim who has been awarded the 2022 Junior Research Parasite Award.
The Parasite awards, given annually, recognize outstanding contributions to the rigorous secondary analysis of data.
Jack, a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the Institute of Infection, Veterinary and Environmental Sciences received the award for his work on ‘Torix Rickettsia are widespread in arthropods and reflect a neglected symbiosis’ , published last year in GigaScience.
His work describes the discovery of Rickettsia amplicons in the Barcode of Life Data System (BOLD), a sequence database specifically designed for the curation of mitochondrial DNA barcodes.
The conclusion of the study supported a previous hypothesis that suggests that Torix Rickettsia are overrepresented in aquatic insects and multiple methods reveal further putative hot spots of infection, including in phloem-feeding bugs, parasitoid wasps, spiders, and vectors of disease. The unknown host effects and transmission strategies of these endosymbionts make these newly discovered associations important to inform future directions of investigation involving the understudied Torix Rickettsia.
Jack said: “I’m honoured to receive this year’s Junior Research Parasite Award. The study which has been acknowledged relating to identifying bacterial contaminants within the Barcoding of Life Database (BOLD) was an unexpected research direction for myself. As a qualified veterinarian, my PhD focused on assessing the potential impacts of bacterial symbionts on the ability of biting insects to transmit viruses to animals. It was only through the serendipitous finding that genes from my main bacterium of study, Rickettsia, were being misclassified as a common molecular marker for taxonomic classification (DNA barcodes), that I had the opportunity to take on my first project analysing large secondary data sets.”
You can read more on Jack’s award on the GigaScience blog.