Departmental homepageDr Salje completed her MBioch in molecular and cellular biochemistry at the University of Oxford in 2005, and her PhD in bacterial cell biology at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in 2010. She worked in Japan, Thailand and the USA before moving to the University of Cambridge as a Wellcome Trust Senior Research Fellow in 2022. She has been affiliated with the Mahidol Oxford Tropical Medicine Research Unit in Bangkok, Thailand, since 2013.
Dr Salje delivers undergraduate lectures in the Departments of Pathology and Biochemistry, and is a director on the MPhil in Biological Sciences (Infection Biology and Molecular Immunology) course. She provides college supervisions to Natural Sciences (Biological) students.
Dr Salje's research focuses on understanding the fundamental biology of a group of bacteria that exclusively replicate inside living eukaryotic cells. These obligate intracellular bacteria cause a range of human and animal diseases, and the Salje lab is particularly focused on one called Orientia tsutsugamusi that causes the severe but neglected human disease scrub typhus. Research areas include mechanisms of bacterial growth and division, interactions with host cells, the evolution of intracellular bacteria and disease pathogenesis.
Manigrasso G, Saharat K, Kullapanich C, Buolanger J, Morgan TE, Kramer H, Salje J*, Carter AP*. The intracellular bacterium Orientia tsutsugamushi hijacks the adaptor protein BICD2 for dynein-based motility, bioRxiv [Preprint] (2024)
Giengkam S, Kullapanich C, Wongsantichon J, Adcox HE, Gillespie JJ, Salje J. Orientia tsutsugamushi: comprehensive analysis of the mobilome of a highly fragmented and repetitive genome reveals ongoing lateral gene transfer in an obligate intracellular bacterium. mSphere (2023)
Atwal S, Giengkam S, Wongsantichon J, Saharat K, Jaiyen Y, Chuenklin S, Chung T, Huh H, Lee S, Sobota R, Salje J. The obligate intracellular bacterium Orientia tsutsugamushi differentiates into a developmentally distinct extracellular state. Nature Communications (2022)
Atwal S, Chuenklin S, Bonder E, Flores E, Gillespie J, Driscoll T, Salje, J. Discovery of a diverse set of bacteria that build their cell walls without the canonical peptidoglycan polymerase aPBP. mBio (2021)
