David Durgan
Baylor College of Medicine, TX·Physiology
High blood pressure (hypertension) is the leading modifiable risk factor for heart disease, and an imbalance in gut bacteria, called gut dysbiosis, can help cause it. The proposed path runs from gut inflammation to inflammation in brain regions that control blood pressure, and then to hypertension.
- Fields
Physiology
Microbiology & Immunology
Neuroscience
- Topics
hypertension
high blood pressure
gut microbiota
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Nov 2028
What they work on
- Identify which gut bacteria produce extracellular vesicles that raise blood pressure, using a dilution scheme to simplify bacterial communities, and test the roles of vesicle flagellin and lipopolysaccharide.
- Determine how bacterial vesicles directly affect gut lining inflammation and barrier function using enteroids grown from normotensive WKY and hypertensive SHRSP rats.
- Define how bacterial vesicles alter microglia and neurons in the paraventricular nucleus using single-cell RNA sequencing, and deplete microglia to test whether neuroinflammation drives vesicle-induced hypertension.
More about the research
That requires the gut and brain to communicate, but how they do so in hypertension is poorly understood. This project tests whether tiny membrane bubbles shed by gut bacteria, called bacterial extracellular vesicles (EVs), carry these messages.
Why it matters
Hypertension affects many people and drives cardiovascular disease. If inflammatory vesicles from gut bacteria help raise blood pressure, they could become targets for new prevention and treatment approaches that change the gut microbiota, offering options beyond current blood pressure drugs.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Anna Salazar
Christopher Newport University, VA·Biology
Test whether age-related breakdown of the gut barrier drives aging changes in the brain and muscle, using fruit flies with reduced levels of the gut seal protein Snakeskin.
Teresa A Milner
Weill Medical College of Cornell University, NY·Neuroscience
Test whether altered GluA1 signaling in PVN neurons contributes to angiotensin II-induced hypertension in post-AOF mice. GluA1 is part of AMPA glutamate receptors, which relay fast excitatory signals between neurons.
Kafait U Malik
University of Tennessee Health Science Center, TN·Pharmacology
Determine how the brain's arachidonic acid/ALOX15 pathway in the paraventricular nucleus contributes to angiotensin II-induced hypertension in female and male mice, using adenovirus gene tools and radiotelemetry.
The school
Baylor College of Medicine: 38 labs on PI Pages, $881M a year on research, 115 research doctorates a year.
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