Jessica Brinkworth
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, IL·Microbiology & Immunology
Does a big animal's immune system work the same way as a small animal's? Body size likely shapes how often an animal meets germs, how it detects them, and how it switches on defenses.
- Fields
Microbiology & Immunology
Ecology & Evolution
Physiology
- Topics
neutrophils
innate immunity
body mass scaling
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through May 2028
What they work on
- Test whether neutrophils, front-line germ-killing white blood cells, from larger mammals kill Escherichia coli less effectively per cell, comparing direct killing and phagocytosis across 20 terrestrial species spanning 7 orders of magnitude in body mass.
- Measure how neutrophil metabolic changes and reactive oxygen species production during bacterial challenge scale with body mass across mammals from mouse-sized to elephant-sized.
- Characterize neutrophil extracellular traps (NETs), DNA webs that trap bacteria, and the gene expression changes that accompany them across species, producing transcriptomic data and an image database.
- Determine how the metabolic rate of NET formation changes with body size in neutrophils from 11 primate species spanning 5 orders of magnitude in mass.
More about the research
Elephants carry far more neutrophils than mice, even after accounting for their size. Neutrophils are the immune system's first-line, germ-killing white blood cells, and they are critical to how infections turn out in mammals. It is unknown whether one elephant neutrophil defends as well as one mouse neutrophil. Answering this could explain how body size limits the evolution of immune defenses. It could also help models of disease spread predict how well species that have never been studied can fight infection.
Why it matters
E. coli is a widespread pathogen that threatens livestock in industrial agriculture and the people and wildlife living near farms. Knowing how neutrophil defenses scale with body size could improve disease-spread models by predicting how well unstudied species resist bacterial infection. The shared gene-expression data and image database could also support other studies of immune defense.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Jocelyn Grunwell
Emory University, GA·Medicine & Clinical Research
Test whether markers of neutrophil cell death, including neutrophil extracellular traps (NETs), in blood and airway samples taken twice in the first week of intubation predict longer intubation or death in children with PARDS.
Albert Siryaporn
University of California-Irvine, CA·Microbiology & Immunology
Identify combinations of human histones with the antimicrobial peptide LL-37 and other membrane- or cell wall-targeting antimicrobials that produce the strongest killing and synergy against Staphylococcus aureus, Pseudomonas aeruginosa, and communities of skin bacteria in vitro.
Robert Campbell
Washington University in St Louis, MO·Medicine & Clinical Research
Determine how the mitochondrial calcium uniporter (MCU), the channel bringing calcium into mitochondria, controls platelet activation, procoagulant platelet formation and platelet-neutrophil aggregates, including signaling through the enzyme Syk.
The school
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign: 41 labs on PI Pages, $907M a year on research, 870 research doctorates a year.
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