Emily Davenport
Pennsylvania State University, PA·Genetics
Trillions of bacteria, archaea, viruses and fungi live in and on the human body, and together they are called the microbiota. They are linked to many complex diseases, yet scientists still know little about why one person's microbial community differs from another's.
- Fields
Genetics
Microbiology & Immunology
Biology
- Topics
human microbiome
microbiota
host genetics
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Jul 2027
What they work on
- Identify links between host genes and the bacteria and archaea living directly on gut and lung mucosal surfaces, by pairing microbial sequencing with single-cell RNA sequencing of the adjacent host tissue.
- Identify non-prokaryotic members of the microbiota, such as eukaryotic viruses, fungi and single-celled eukaryotes, whose presence is associated with human gene expression in gut and lung tissue.
- Determine whether microbes drive changes in host gene expression or the reverse, using genetic epidemiology methods to infer causality and confirming key relationships with in vitro experiments.
- Compare gut and lung to find the microbial taxa, host cell types and host pathways that support cross-kingdom interactions in both organs or in only one.
More about the research
One factor is our own DNA: earlier work by this PI and others showed that a person's genes affect which microbes appear in stool samples. This research program treats the microbiome like any inherited trait, such as height, and uses the tools of human genetics to ask how host genes and microbes influence each other.
Why it matters
Knowing which microbes the body controls, and through which host cell types and pathways, could point to parts of the microbiome worth targeting with new microbiome-based therapies. Because the microbiota is tied to many complex diseases, mapping how healthy people maintain these communities in the gut and lung could help researchers understand what goes wrong in disease.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Sharon Bewick
Clemson University, SC·Ecology & Evolution
Test whether genetically identical parthenogenetic whiptail lizards (Aspidoscelis) show less individual-to-individual variation in gut and skin microbiota than their sexually reproducing, genetically diverse parent species, using 16S rRNA gene sequencing.
June Louise Round
University of Utah, UT·Microbiology & Immunology
Catalog which commensal viruses in stool from healthy humans are bound by mucosal IgA and IgG antibodies, by purifying and sorting antibody-coated DNA and RNA viral particles.
Rustem Ismagilov
California Institute of Technology, CA·Microbiology & Immunology
Optimize T-BEAM in germ-free tissue spiked with defined bacteria, targeting over 1,000-fold removal of host nucleic acids while preserving bacterial transcriptional profiles and RNA yield.
The school
Pennsylvania State University: 60 labs on PI Pages, $1.3B a year on research, 743 research doctorates a year.
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