Our Team
PI
Jan Dvořák
I obtained my Ph.D. in molecular parasitology from Charles University in 2005. Then I spent fruitful years as a postdoc at the Sandler Center for Drug Discovery at the University of California San Francisco in Jim McKerrow's laboratory working on proteolytic enzymes under the supervision of Conor Caffrey. After my return to Europe, my research is focused primarily but not only on proteolytic enzymes and their inhibitors from parasitic organisms. Our laboratory routinely works with platyhelminth and nematode parasites using Schistosoma mansoni and Caenorhabditis elegans as research models. We actively collaborate with our partners from Europe and USA.
Researchers/postdocs
Lucie Jedličková
Lucie completed her Ph.D. studies at the Department of Parasitology at the Faculty of Science, Charles University, where she was focused on peptidases and their inhibitors from blood-feeding monogenean parasites of carps Eudiplozoon nipponicum. During her studies, she gained experience in the field of molecular biology, biochemistry, and immunohistochemistry. She is currently working on bioactive molecules from blood fluke Schistosoma mansoni involved in parasite-host interactions.
Lucie Panská
Lucie Panská graduated from the Faculty of Science of Masaryk University in Brno. Then she studied a doctoral program at the 3rd Medical Faculty of Charles University, where she defended her doctoral thesis named “Study of neuropathophysiological changes in the mammalian host caused by avian schistosome infection”. She worked as a researcher at the Department of Parasitology, Faculty of Science, Charles University in Prague and studied pathology and immune response in the CNS of mice infected with the neuropathogenic avian schistosome Trichobilharzia regenti. At our laboratory, she is involved in research on biologically active molecules of parasitic helminths. Her main research interests are imaging techniques (light and fluorescence microscopy, confocal microscopy, and transmission electron microscopy) and subsequent digital image processing.
Vojtěch Vacek
Vojta has studied parasitology in the faculty of science Of Charles University. During his studies, he was interested in evolutionary protistology, focusing on mitochondria of anaerobic protists and Iron-Sulfur cluster assembly in Preaxostyla. After finishing his Ph.D., he moved to the Lab of Jan Dvorak and is mainly working with the model organism Caenorhabditis elegans. He is primarily doing transcriptomic and phylogenetic analyses as well as some molecular biology in the lab.
PhD. Students
Štěpánka Nedvědová
Stepanka Nedvedova graduated MSc in Nutrition and Foodstuffs at the Faculty of Agrobiology, Food and Natural Resources of the Czech University of Life Sciences in Prague, where she studied food quality and analysis. Currently, she is studying Ph.D. at the Department of Chemistry at FAPPZ, CZU, and is working on secretory proteins of Schistosoma mansoni eggs. Furthermore, in the framework of a double Ph.D. with the Claude Bernard University Lyon 1 and the Institute of Analytical Sciences in Villeurbanne, she is working on protein expression, biophysical determination of the protein structure, molecular interactions, and in silico modeling.
Kristýna Peterková
Týna graduated from Charles University with a Master's degree in Parasitology, where she focused on gene expression patterns of giant liver fluke’s Fascioloides magna peptidases. She is currently in the third year of her Ph.D. studies at Charles University and in our laboratory, her major research interest lies in bioinformatics, by means of which she investigates transcriptomic profiles of Schistosoma mansoni eggs of different strains in different phases of infection. At the beginning of her third year of Ph.D. studies, she went on an internship at a partner lab in San Diego, California, where she is working on peptidase activities of specific egg molecules.
Enoch Boateng
Lukáš Konečný
Lukáš graduated from Charles University with a Master's degree in Parasitology, where he focused on excretory-secretory products of avian schistosomes of the genus Trichobilharzia. He also completed his MPhil at University College London, where he worked on a bioinformatics pipeline for the identification of hidden parasites in RNAseq datasets. He is currently a 1st year Ph.D. student, and his dissertation focuses on Venom allergen-like proteins of Schistosoma mansoni eggs - the causative agent of human schistosomiasis. His project primarily studies gene expression levels, immunohistochemical localization of these molecules, and protein interactions using molecular-biochemical methods.
