Sabine Lauer

Microbial Pathogenesis and Host Immunity and Assay Development

Sabine Lauer obtained a PhD in Biological Sciences with specialty in Immunobiology from the University of Leipzig, Germany (1992) and a MS in Food Chemistry from the Technical University Dresden, Germany (1987). After obtaining her PhD she worked as a post-doctoral researcher on lipid and protein transport in erythrocyte-infected with the human malaria parasite P. falciparum in Dr. Kasturi Haldar’s laboratory at Stanford University (1993-1998). From 1998 until 2001 she investigated molecular assemblies on cells and microspheres using kinetic flow cytometry as a postdoctoral researcher with Dr. Larry Sklar (UNM) and John Nolan (LANL). She has been a technical staff member at LANL since 2001. She has experience in biology of infections and intoxications (biological toxins), immunology, and assay development (especially flow cytometric). She has published in these areas and holds a patent on a potential new drug for treatment of human malaria.

Research Interests

• Role of lipid rafts for infections and intoxications.
• Discovery of lipid raft constituents that provide potential targets for therapeutics and markers for pre-symptomatic diagnosis of infections and intoxications.
• Pathogen interference with Toll-like receptor pathways of innate immunity.
• Development of high-throughput flow cytometric assays for drug discovery.

Representative Publications

K.M. Grace, R.M. Goeller, W.K. Grace, J.D. Kolar, L.J. Morrison, M.R. Sweet, L.G. Wiig, S.M. Reed, S. A. Lauer, K.M. Little, G. Bustos, A.S. Anderson, and B.I. Swanson (2003) Reagentless Optical Biosensor. Proceedings of SPIE; Chemical and Biological Point Sensors for Homeland Defense, 5269, 55-64.

S.A. Lauer and J.P. Nolan (2002) Development and characterization of Ni2+-NTA bearing microspheres. Cytometry 48, 136-145.

S.A. Lauer, R.L. Nolan, B. Goldstein and J.P. Nolan (2002) Analysis of cholera toxin - ganglioside interactions by flow cytometry. Biochemistry 41, 1741-1751.

S.A. Lauer, J. VanWye, T. Harrison, H. McManus, B.U. Samuel, N.L. Hiller, N. Mohandas and K. Haldar (2000) Vacuolar uptake of host components, and a role for cholesterol and sphingomyelin in malaria infection. EMBO Journal 19, 3556-3564.

J.P. Nolan, S.A. Lauer, E.R. Prossnitz and L.A. Sklar (1999) Flow cytometry: a versatile tool for all phases of drug discovery. Drug Discovery Today  4, 173-180.

S.A. Lauer, P.K. Rathod, N. Ghori and K. Haldar (1997) A membrane network for nutrient import in red cells infected with the malaria parasite. Science 276, 1122-1125.

S.A. Lauer, N. Ghori and K. Haldar (1995) Sphingolipid synthesis as a target for chemotherapy against malaria parasites. PNAS, USA 92, 9181-9185.