Jenessa Winston
Ohio State University, OH·Microbiology & Immunology·Early-career
People with inflammatory bowel disease (IBD), a long-running inflammation of the gut, are four times more likely to pick up Clostridioides difficile, a bacterium that causes severe diarrhea and colitis. They also die more often and suffer more complications from it than the general population.
- Fields
Microbiology & Immunology
Medicine & Clinical Research
- Topics
Clostridioides difficile
C. difficile infection
inflammatory bowel disease
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Jun 2027
What they work on
- 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.
- Characterize how intestinal inflammation alters the gut microbiome, the bile acid metagenome and metabolome, and the host response during C. difficile infection, using shotgun metagenomics and metabolomics.
- Compare C. difficile susceptibility and disease severity in colitis mice carrying defined microbial ecosystems that can synthesize secondary bile acids versus ones that cannot, using precision microbiota modulation.
More about the research
Why IBD opens this door is unknown, which makes prevention impossible to design. The focus here is bile acids: gut bacteria convert the body's own bile acids into secondary bile acids (SBAs), and those SBAs help the gut resist being colonized by C. difficile.
Why it matters
Patients with inflammatory bowel disease who develop C. difficile infection face higher mortality, more complications and higher costs than other patients. Showing how inflammation-driven loss of microbial bile acids removes natural resistance to infection could point to non-antibiotic treatments and preventives for this group, such as bile acid supplementation with UDCA or targeted reshaping of the gut microbiota.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Ting Fu
University of Wisconsin-Madison, WI·Microbiology & Immunology
Determine how host- and microbe-derived bile acids generated during inflammation and tumor growth shape gut macrophages and their crosstalk with T cells and intestinal stem cells.
Joseph Lee
University of Colorado Denver/Anschutz Medical Campus, CO·Microbiology & Immunology·Early-career
Test whether the microbial purine hypoxanthine shapes the energy metabolism of gut lining cells by turning on TIGAR, a protein that reroutes sugar metabolism, and AMPK, a master energy sensor.
Tiangang Li
University of Oklahoma-Health Sciences Center, OK·Physiology
Identify which Cullin-RING E3 ligase complex mediates the benefits of neddylation inhibitors on blood sugar and liver fat, using liver-specific knockout mice and AAV8 gene delivery in mouse models of fatty liver disease.
The school
Ohio State University: 71 labs on PI Pages, $1.6B a year on research, 882 research doctorates a year.
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