Jessica Kissinger is a Distinguished Research Professor at the

Franklin College of Arts and Sciences The Franklin College of Arts and Sciences is the oldest and largest college of the University of Georgia (UGA) in Athens, Georgia. Established in 1801 following the American Revolution, the college was named in honor of American Founding Father B ...

University of Georgia , mottoeng = "To teach, to serve, and to inquire into the nature of things.""To serve" was later added to the motto without changing the seal; the Latin motto directly translates as "To teach and to inquire into the nature of things." , establ ...

and director of the Institute of

Bioinformatics Bioinformatics () is an interdisciplinary field that develops methods and software tools for understanding biological data, in particular when the data sets are large and complex. As an interdisciplinary field of science, bioinformatics combi ...

. Her research focus is on the evolution, assembly and data curation of

protozoan parasite Protozoan infections are parasitic diseases caused by organisms formerly classified in the kingdom Protozoa. They are usually contracted by either an insect vector or by contact with an infected substance or surface and include organisms that are ...

genome In the fields of molecular biology and genetics, a genome is all the genetic information of an organism. It consists of nucleotide sequences of DNA (or RNA in RNA viruses). The nuclear genome includes protein-coding genes and non-coding ge ...

s, particularly

Cryptosporidium ''Cryptosporidium'', sometimes informally called crypto, is a genus of apicomplexan parasitic alveolates that can cause a respiratory and gastrointestinal illness (cryptosporidiosis) that primarily involves watery diarrhea (intestinal cryptosp ...

, ''

Toxoplasma gondii ''Toxoplasma gondii'' () is an obligate intracellular parasitic protozoan (specifically an apicomplexan) that causes toxoplasmosis. Found worldwide, ''T. gondii'' is capable of infecting virtually all warm-blooded animals, but felids, such as d ...

'' and

Plasmodium ''Plasmodium'' is a genus of unicellular eukaryotes that are obligate parasites of vertebrates and insects. The life cycles of ''Plasmodium'' species involve development in a blood-feeding insect host which then injects parasites into a vert ...

Biography

Kissinger obtained her PhD at

Indiana University Indiana University (IU) is a system of public universities in the U.S. state of Indiana. Campuses Indiana University has two core campuses, five regional campuses, and two regional centers under the administration of IUPUI. *Indiana Universit ...

in 1995. During her PostDoc she worked with David Roos to help establish the Eukaryotic Pathogen Database (EuPathDB) series of genome collections, including the malaria specific PlasmoDB, for easy querying and access by scientists. Since its launch in 1999 the database has accrued 9TB of data, has been received renewed grant contributions by the

NIH The National Institutes of Health, commonly referred to as NIH (with each letter pronounced individually), is the primary agency of the United States government responsible for biomedical and public health research. It was founded in the late ...

at every funding cycle, and now receives 6 million searches a year from 13,000 individuals. Most recently Kissinger and Roos were awarded a grant that is expected to total US$23.4million for maintaining the resource. The success of EuPathDB has led to the creation of Clinical Epidemiology Database (ClinEpiDB) based on the same framework, alongside Christian Stoekert and Christiane Hertz-Fowler. In 2008, while an associate professor, she was made a National Associate of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. She helped to establish the Institute of Bioinformatics at the University of Georgia and then became director. In 2016 she was awarded the Richard F. Reiff Internationalization Award by the University (alongside fellow professor Rose Chepyator-Thomson) for her international collaborations, opening up data internationally, and for being a member of the steering group for the West African International Centers of Excellence for Malaria Research at the

National Institutes of Health The National Institutes of Health, commonly referred to as NIH (with each letter pronounced individually), is the primary agency of the United States government responsible for biomedical and public health research. It was founded in the late ...

. Beyond the creation of databases, Kissinger focuses on the analysis and comparison of parasite genomes. Using genome assemblies from across the

Apicomplexa The Apicomplexa (also called Apicomplexia) are a large phylum of parasitic alveolates. Most of them possess a unique form of organelle that comprises a type of non-photosynthetic plastid called an apicoplast, and an apical complex structure. T ...

(which includes malaria and toxoplasmosis parasites) it was shown that genetic synteny (genes arranged in the same groupings in different genomes) was substantially less than expected from animal genomes, suggesting that the parasite genomes have undergone major rearrangements or that their most recent common ancestor is more ancient than previously thought. In 2012 her lab helped develop a computational tool, MCScanX, to identify synteny across genomes, which has been cited >650 times. Kissinger continues to make

big data Though used sometimes loosely partly because of a lack of formal definition, the interpretation that seems to best describe Big data is the one associated with large body of information that we could not comprehend when used only in smaller am ...

obtained from investigations into parasites as accessible as it can be. The Malaria Host-Pathogen Interaction Center, a collaboration with

Emory University Emory University is a private research university in Atlanta, Georgia. Founded in 1836 as "Emory College" by the Methodist Episcopal Church and named in honor of Methodist bishop John Emory, Emory is the second-oldest private institution of ...

, funded by the

National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID, ) is one of the 27 institutes and centers that make up the National Institutes of Health (NIH), an agency of the United States Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). NIAID's ...

and headed by Mary Galinski, is embarking on a major project to characterise many thousands of malaria-mammal associations and Kissinger is involved in converting this data into a format that can be used by everyone. She said of the project: "The goal of my team is to integrate the terabytes of data being produced on both the host and the parasite and make it accessible to our mathematical modelers, who are looking for patterns and signals, as well as the global malaria research community to guarantee that this large investment has the biggest impact possible on malaria research".

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Kissinger, Jessica Indiana University alumni American women biologists American geneticists Living people Year of birth missing (living people) University of Georgia faculty American women geneticists 21st-century American biologists 21st-century American women scientists American women academics