Maggie has a new paper out in The Journal of Infectious Diseases!

Maggie’s second dissertation chapter, “Differential effects of two common antiparasitics on microbiota resilience,” was published in The Journal of Infectious Diseases in November 2023. In this work, Maggie led a study of the effects of albendazole (a drug that targets parasitic worms) and metronidazole (a drug that targets protozoans) on the gut microbiota of mice. Albendazole did not significantly change the gut microbiota, but metronidazole significantly depleted the diversity of beneficial bacterial taxa. That said, the mouse gut microbiota recovered to look like untreated mice after a two-week period with no metronidazole treatment. There has been little work on understanding the effects of antiparasitic drugs on the gut microbiome when there is no parasite infection, and this work will help establish a baseline of expected bacterial losses from antiparasitics.