Qingjie Li
University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston, TX·Physiology
The trillions of microbes living in the gut act almost like an extra organ, shaping metabolism, immunity and even the health of distant organs. Two lines of work here ask what happens when that community goes wrong, or is replaced: one tests whether transplanting a youthful microbial community can slow aging of the heart, liver and brain, and the other traces how the disturbed gut microbes of inflammatory bowel disease damage the heart.
- Fields
Physiology
Microbiology & Immunology
Medicine & Clinical Research
- Topics
gut microbiome
fecal microbiota transplantation
dysbiosis
- Grants
- 2 known grants, through Jul 2028
What they work on
- Test whether transplanting a mouse's own banked youthful gut microbiome into mature adult mice delays physiological and molecular aging, combining heart, liver and cognitive function tests with organ transcriptomics and microbiome profiling.
- Compare the rejuvenating effect of young donor microbiomes against the aging-promoting effect of old ones in aged mice, scoring outcomes with a composite rejuvenation index and identifying the distinguishing microbial taxa and pathways.
- Determine whether the disturbed gut microbiota of inflammatory bowel disease alone causes cardiac dysfunction, by transplanting stool from IBD patients and colitis mice into bacteria-depleted mice and testing reversal with normal stool or probiotics.
- Test whether miR-155 carried in exosomes from intestinal epithelial cells links gut dysbiosis to the heart, using mice lacking miR-155 specifically in gut epithelium and colitis-prone IL-10-deficient crosses, plus miR-155 inhibitors.
- Define how BDNF, a growth factor, is epigenetically suppressed in heart muscle cells during colitis and what it does in the adult heart, using a tamoxifen-inducible cardiac-specific BDNF knockout mouse and proteomics.
More about the research
Both use fecal microbiota transplantation in mice and follow molecular signals that travel from gut to other organs.
Why it matters
Age-related decline in the heart, liver and brain and the raised cardiovascular risk of inflammatory bowel disease both lack good preventive treatments. Identifying which gut microbes protect organ function could lead to defined microbial therapies or probiotics that promote healthy aging and lower risk of Alzheimer's disease and cancer, while mapping the microbe-to-heart signaling chain in colitis could yield new targets, such as miR-155 blockers or BDNF, to protect the hearts of IBD patients.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Jenessa Winston
Ohio State University, OH·Microbiology & Immunology·Early-career
Test whether daily supplementation with the secondary bile acid ursodeoxycholic acid (UDCA) changes susceptibility to and severity of Clostridioides difficile infection in IL10-knockout colitis mice.
Eliseo Castillo
University of New Mexico, NM·Microbiology & Immunology
Determine how varying doses and types of microplastic particles alter intestinal permeability, meaning leakiness of the gut lining, using a zebrafish exposure model.
Ai-Ling Lin
University of Missouri-Columbia, MO·Neuroscience
Identify how the severity of gut dysbiosis tracks over time with regional amyloid, tau and neurodegeneration markers and cognition in Alzheimer's patients and healthy controls, using PET, 7 Tesla MRI, gut microbiome sequencing and cognitive testing.
The school
University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston: 14 labs on PI Pages, $241M a year on research, 141 research doctorates a year.
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