Our Research
We are broadly interested in how bacteria and viruses interact with, and often subvert, their host’s immune system. An infection can be viewed like a race. The host immune system has to detect an invading pathogen and respond, while pathogens like bacteria and viruses must evade detection and replicate. Who wins that race determines the outcome of disease.
Ìý ÌýOur Mission
The ultimate goal of our work is to defeat human pathogens and cancers by bettering our understanding of immune signaling.
Host–pathogen dynamics are shaped by the exchange of chemical signals between invaders and their victims (the host). In mammals, detection of pathogenic bacteria and viruses starts with receptors of the innate immune system that sense microbe-derived chemicals. Innate immune signaling activates the rest of the immune system to sterilize the infection. Identification of ligands (chemical signals) that activate the innate immune system has led to a better understanding of vaccines and the design of novel adjuvants. What’s more, some of these adjuvants even activate the immune system to fight cancer.
Our lab studies the innate immune system, the microbe-derived ligands important for immune activation, and general aspects of pathogenesis. We are particularly focused on immune pathways that use nucleotide second messengers to amplify signaling. One of the most exciting characteristics of these pathways is that they are found in both animal and bacterial cells. The same molecular machinery that allows eukaryotes to respond to DNA viruses (called the cGAS-STING pathway), is also found in bacteria. cGAS-like enzymes in bacteria are important for defense against to phages. These findings provide a highly tractable and rapid model system for studying the cGAS-STING pathway.
The finding of antiviral genes from bacteria that are homologous to antiviral genes in humans has led to the unexpected hypothesis that early eukaryotes must have assimilated and repurposed bacterial phage defense genes. This new paradigm in evolution of the immune system establishes bacterium-phage interactions as a relevant model system. Further, our lab is interested in identifying other elements of the human immune system that can be found in bacteria, understanding molecular mechanisms of phage detection, and distilling these findings to identify generalizable aspects of immune systems. We recently identified bacterial NLR-related proteins, which are related to core components of the "inflammasome" inÌýhumans.
For more information on work from our lab, check out theÌýfull list ofÌýour publications.
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