How to get italic text in Header 1 in Markdown? (R Presentation)

Question

I just started playing around with R Presentations yesterday and got stuck on a Markdown thing that seems to be specific for R (at least it's no problem here on SO).
The start of a slide is always marked with "header 1" code, and this code apparently doesn't allow * or _ to create italic text. Since I'm working with bacterial data and would like to use the species name, by default in italics, in the head line, I'm wondering if there's any way to do that.
Can somebody give me a hint, please?

Example:

Header With *Italic* Part ========================================================

will always look like

Header With Italic Part

in the presentation.

Update:
This is a bug in RStudio Presentations as explained here.

Answer 1

This should probably be closed, but to make it clear: Most Markdown syntaxes do support combining headers and italics, as in:

#### *My Header*