{"id":2022,"date":"2025-04-28T13:57:16","date_gmt":"2025-04-28T12:57:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sites.manchester.ac.uk\/mfig\/?p=2022"},"modified":"2025-04-28T13:58:16","modified_gmt":"2025-04-28T12:58:16","slug":"meet-the-phd-student-phurichaya-jane-khunthong","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sites.manchester.ac.uk\/mfig\/2025\/04\/28\/meet-the-phd-student-phurichaya-jane-khunthong\/","title":{"rendered":"Meet the PhD student: Phurichaya (Jane) Khunthong"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Hi! I\u2019m Phurichaya, but you can call me Jane. I\u2019m from Thailand and funded by the Development and Promotion of Science and Technology Talents (DPST) scholarship sponsored by the Thai government.<\/p>\n

My interest in medical mycology started during my bachelor\u2019s degree in zoology at Chulalongkorn University, Thailand, when I conducted research about fungal infection and pathogenicity in houseflies and did an internship at the mycology unit in the hospital in Thailand. As I decided to pursue a research career in mycology, I studied a master\u2019s degree in microbiology at the University of Aberdeen, which introduced me to fundamental knowledge of medical mycology, biotechnology, and bioinformatics. For my master\u2019s project, I worked on suppressor screening of randomised genome-wide mutants of Caenorhabditis elegans, aiming to identify the mechanistic function of CMTr1. Despite the model organism being unrelated to fungi, I gained experience in eukaryotic genetic manipulation and basic phenotypic screening, which could be applied to fungal research.<\/p>\n

With my educational background and passion in the field, I\u2019m starting my PhD journey in MFIG. The focus of my research is to investigate the impacts of nutrition acquisition on Aspergillus fumigatus and identify nutrients that determine its ability to invade host cells. The project involves phenotypic characterisation of knockout isolates, virulence experiments in a mammalian cell line, and susceptibility tests. The research outcome will give a better understanding of nutritional conditions during cell infection and their role in virulence, which could benefit fungal infection model development and antifungal efficiency testing.<\/p>\n

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