This series is for genetics health professionals led by the Canadian College of Medical Genetics and co-sponsored by Can-GARD. Speakers will be translation-focused researchers, clinicians and innovators. The series will help attendees anticipate, access, and apply new approaches and technologies for patient care.
The Can-GARD/CCMG Leading Strand Series is a self-approved group learning activity (Section 1) as defined by the Maintenance of Certification Program of the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Canada.
We are pleased to share that as of the 2026/2027 season, the Garrod Association will be providing two presentations per season.
To register, click the button below or go to: https://us06web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_e2yO6xnsSK2v70BLslqwjA
2025-2026 Leading Strand from 12:00pm – 1:00pm ET on:
Friday April 24, 2026
A New Approach to Discovering Genes Underlying Inborn Errors of Immunity
Driven by the rapid discovery of bacterial anti-phage defense systems, numerous parallels have emerged between prokaryotic and eukaryotic cell-autonomous innate immune systems. For example, components of human RNA interference and gasdermin pathways have functional analogues in bacteria. These findings suggest that many additional links between prokaryotic and eukaryotic immune systems remain to be uncovered, particularly given the recent identification of more than one hundred new bacterial defense systems, many of which remain mechanistically uncharacterized.
In this talk, I will describe how we plan to leverage such parallels to identify novel immune-related genes. Specifically, we are developing a computational pipeline for gene discovery and functional annotation, which we will subsequently use to identify rare, damaging variants in large cohorts of patients with immunological and autoinflammatory disorders. Our goals are to advance our understanding of inherited immune disorders, known as inborn errors of immunity (IEIs), and to improve the genetic diagnostic yield for patients with IEIs.
Learning Objectives:
- Recognize that discoveries from microbial immune systems can be leveraged to advance our mechanistic understanding of human immune pathways and disease biology.
- Describe how bacteria and bacteriophages can be utilized as experimentally tractable platforms to test hypotheses generated through structural homology-based approaches.
- Summarize a new approach to identifying and prioritizing novel genes and pathways underlying inborn errors of immunity.
Speaker: Dr. Chantel Trost
Dr. Chantel Trost received her Ph.D. in Biology from the University of Saskatchewan, where she studied the phylogenetics and phylogeography of ticks and tick-borne pathogens. Subsequently, she trained as a Postdoctoral Fellow in the lab of Dr. Alan Davidson in the Department of Molecular Genetics at the University of Toronto, where she used microbiology, biochemistry, molecular biology, and bioinformatics techniques to study protein inhibitors of CRISPR-Cas systems, known as anti-CRISPRs.
As a new Scientist at The Hospital for Sick Children, Dr. Trost plans to continue studying CRISPR-Cas systems—some of which are powerful genome editing tools, while others have the potential to be harnessed to combat antimicrobial resistance—and their inhibitors. More broadly, she is interested in uncovering the molecular mechanisms underlying host-pathogen interactions and applying this knowledge to develop innovative biotechnology tools for both research and clinical use.
