Ellen Foxman
Yale University, CT·Microbiology & Immunology
Many viruses live inside healthy people without causing obvious illness. Together they form the human virome.
- Fields
Microbiology & Immunology
Genetics
Medicine & Clinical Research
- Topics
human virome
persistent viral infection
RNA viruses
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Jan 2030
What they work on
- Improve detection of viruses that replicate in airway lining cells, including RNA respiratory viruses that persist after infection, by using airway epithelial organoids (small lab-grown airway tissues) to amplify viruses from human tonsil samples.
- Enhance detection of viruses that replicate in tonsil cells, such as DNA viruses that infect lymphocytes (white blood cells), by growing viruses from donor tonsils in tonsil organoid cultures.
- Map viral sequences to specific host cells and tissue locations in the tonsil by adding custom virus-targeting primers during single-cell sequencing and spatial transcriptomics, methods that read gene activity cell by cell and place by place.
More about the research
Early evidence suggests that this hidden collection may affect who develops common diseases, including autoimmune disease, heart disease and cancer. Studying these connections first requires a way to see the virome clearly. Current genome-sequencing methods leave three major gaps: they miss many viruses that infect human (eukaryotic) cells, they miss many RNA viruses, and they reveal little about which cells and tissue locations host these viruses.
Why it matters
If viruses quietly living in our tissues influence the risk of conditions such as autoimmunity, heart disease and cancer, they could be modifiable risk factors. Accurate tools to detect these viruses and locate them in specific cells could eventually help researchers find new ways to prevent and treat these common diseases.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Jian Ouyang
Medical University of South Carolina, SC·Genetics
Provide reliable, cost-effective next-generation sequencing library preparation, including bulk RNA-seq, ChIP-seq, ATAC-seq and methylation sequencing, for cancer center investigators.
Jovanny Zabaleta
Louisiana State University Health Sciences Center-New Orleans, LA·Genetics
Provide next-generation sequencing services, including whole transcriptome and RNA sequencing, whole exome sequencing, and array-based DNA methylation and SNP analysis, to cancer research project leaders.
Jessica Sowa
West Chester University of Pennsylvania, PA·Microbiology & Immunology
Screen wild free-living nematodes, collected by students in the Nematode Hunters program, for infections that spread to C. elegans strains carrying fluorescent infection reporters.
The school
Yale University: 73 labs on PI Pages, $1.5B a year on research, 438 research doctorates a year.
Reach out
A start for your email. Fill in the brackets.