Dominique Soldati-Favre: Bringing Toxoplasma gondii to the Molecular World

Anyone that knows Dominique, knows that she has a real passion for science and discovery. This passion includes parasitology so it might come as a surprise that she moved to the parasitology field almost by accident. After doing a brilliant PhD in Zurich, Switzerland, in the Schümperli team, working on RNA processing, Dominique, with the support of a Swiss National Foundation postdoctoral grant and an EMBO fellowship, decided to join a lab in the US East Coast, but life decided otherwise and, in 1991, she joined John Boothroyd’s team at Stanford University, in California. This was an outstanding team, with access to exceptional facilities, but it was transitioning from working on Trypanosomes to studying Toxoplasma gondii. Although Toxoplasma was easily cultured in the lab, it had yet to be genetically modified. At a time when the genome had yet to be sequenced and molecular biology was done without kits, Dominique, with her high energy level and swiss organization, showed that Toxoplasma could be transfected, a first for an intracellular parasite (Soldati and Boothroyd, 1993). She also showed, with other team members, that the transfected parasites could be drug selected and used for transgene expression, gene knockout and complementation (Kim et al., 1993; Soldati and Boothroyd, 1995; Black et al., 1995; Soldati et al., 1995). Her work did an enormous amount for the field and things became easier afterwards. In 1995, Dominique finished her postdoctoral studies and moved to Germany to become an independent group leader. She was appointed Assistant Professor at the Center for Molecular Biology at the University of Heidelberg. There, she adapted the Cre-loxP system to Toxoplasma (Brecht et al., 1999) and revolutionized the field yet again by establishing the first inducible knockdown system for an Apicomplexa (Meissner et al., 2001; Meissner et al., 2002b). In 2001, Dominique moved her team to the Imperial College London, in the UK, where she held a position as a Senior Lecturer and Reader. In 2004, she became a Visiting Professor in parasitology at Imperial College and was appointed Associate Professor at the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Geneva, where her team is still based at, and where she became a Full Professor in 2010.