A former COBRE Small Grants Program award recipient, Angel Yanagihara, one of the world’s foremost experts on jellyfish envenomation, is currently serving a six-week assignment as a U.S. Department of State Fulbright Specialist at Mahidol University in Bangkok, Thailand. She is working with her host…

The purpose of the Centers of Biomedical Research Excellence (COBRE) Small Grants Program is to provide support via three funding mechanisms to University of Hawaii (UH) faculty engaged in research in tropical medicine, medical microbiology, immunology, and non-HIV/AIDS emerging infectious diseases….

The cover story in the January 2018 issue of Nature Medicine, entitled ‘Puzzling over privilege’, highlights the research on Zika virus by Saguna Verma and her co-workers, published recently in the October 2017 issue of the Journal of Virology.

The recent Zika and Ebola virus epidemics have s…

Confirmed reports of Zika virus (ZIKV) in seminal fluid months after clearance of viremia suggests that ZIKV can establish persistent infection in the seminiferous tubules, an immune privileged site of the testis. The seminiferous tubule epithelium is mainly composed of Sertoli cells that function t…

Serologic testing remains crucial for Zika virus diagnosis. We found that urea wash in a Zika virus nonstructural protein 1 IgG ELISA distinguishes secondary dengue virus infection from Zika virus infection with previous dengue (sensitivity 87.5%, specificity 93.8%). This test will aid serodiagnosis…

Background: Sampling of saliva for diagnosing Plasmodium falciparum infections is a safe, non-invasive alternative to sampling of blood. However, the use of saliva presents a challenge because lower concentrations of parasite DNA are present in saliva compared to peripheral blood. Therefore, a sensi…