Tiger Aspell has successfully completed his PhD project entitled ‘Characterization of Two Novel Putative Virulence Factors in Streptococcus pyogenes’. He was supervised by Professor Thomas Proft, Dr Jacelyn Loh and Dr Catherine Tsai.
Tiger’s work showed that the previously uncharacterized open reading frames spy1094 and spy1370 encode two peptidoglycan deacetylases that catalyse removal of acetyl residues from the bacterial cell wall. This results in increased resistance to lysozyme and increased bacterial virulence. Tiger’s work has resulted in two articles published in international scientific journals.