Abstract: Orientia tsutsugamushi is the bacterial causative agent of the arthropod-borne human disease, scrub typhus. This life-threatening infection is endemic across large parts of Asia, but has been historically under-reported due to difficulties in diagnosis. In addition to being of significant clinical importance, O. tsutsugamushi is a fascinating bacterial species. It is an obligate intracellular bacterium in the Rickettsiaceae family but occupies its own genus reflecting unique and unusual properties of its genome, life cycle and cell wall structure. I will describe our recent work in developing tools to study a poorly characterised organism, as well as recent insights into the fundamental biology of Orientia tsutsugamushi and what this can teach us about adaptation to the intracellular replicative niche.

Biography: Jeanne Salje is a Wellcome Trust Senior Research Fellow at Cambridge University and the Mahidol Oxford Tropical Medicine Research Unit in Bangkok. Her group studies the cell biology of the human pathogenic bacterium Orientia tsutsugamushi. Dr. Saljestudied Biochemistry at Oxford University, and then did her PhD at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, UK in the group of Jan Löwe. She then moved to the Systems Biology Department at Harvard Medical School, before starting her research group at MORU in 2013. She was previously based at Rutgers University in New Jersey before moving to Cambridge in 2022.