Javier Sotillo-Gallego

I obtained my PhD in 2011 at University of Valencia (Spain) with high honours under the supervision of Dr. Rafael Toledo and J. Guillermo Esteban. My interests during my PhD were the host-parasite interactions at a proteomics and immunological level in the Echinostoma-rodent. In 2012 I was appointed as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at James Cook University at the laboratory of Alex Loukas.

My research focus is the analysis of the proteomes and secretomes of parasites and how they orchestrate a parasitic existence. I am also interested in the host-parasite relationships, with a particular emphasis on soil-transmitted helminths (e.g. hookworms, whipworms, roundworms) and water-borne trematodes such as Schistosoma spp. I have described the excretory-secretory proteins of different helminths and have been involved in in analyses of large-scale sequence datasets generated from a range of parasites (i.e. transcriptomes). I recently focused my attention to study small-secreted parasitic vesicles (exosomes) and their implication in parasite-host communication and the modulation of the host’s immune response.