PhD student Caroline Weight recently won a prize for a poster that she presented at an international conference on aspects of tight junctions, which are specialised connections between adjacent epithelial cells. Her poster outlined some of the major findings from her PhD on how the protozoan parasite Toxoplasma gondii targets tight junctions and occludin protein in epithelial cells to invade its host.

Part of the prize includes an invitation to submit articles to a dedicated volume of the journal ‘Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences.’ The conference, on ‘barriers and channels formed by tight junction proteins, from mechanisms to diseases and back,’ was held in Berlin in September 2011 and brought together the world’s leading researchers in this field.