The overall goal of our project is to better understand the fundamental mechanisms behind inter-individual differences in temperature and immunometabolic pathways and their impact on immune responses in health and infection. We will study these differences through cellular mechanistic models, population immunology cohorts, and experimental clinical studies. We hope to both reveal fundamental biology and apply these discoveries to relevant clinical questions in infection and autoimmunity.
Our work with Biomics focuses on analyzing normal variation in healthy adults’ immunometabolism. We are profiling healthy blood from donors balanced for age and sex. We will test how immunometabolism varies when stimulated with infectious agents, and with changing temperatures to mimic fever conditions. We will measure these upstream metabolic changes in different cell types through single-cell RNAseq, as well as using the supernatant to measure downstream cytokine production effects.
