Nathan Schoettler
University of Chicago, IL·Microbiology & Immunology
Children who grow up on traditional farms are much less likely to develop asthma, but it is not clear how farm life changes the immune system to protect them. Asthma is the most common chronic childhood illness, and immune cells drive the disease.
- Fields
Microbiology & Immunology
Genetics
Medicine & Clinical Research
- Topics
asthma
farm effect
Amish
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Jul 2027
What they work on
- Define the immune cell landscape in blood from Amish and Hutterite children using single-cell RNA sequencing, comparing cell type proportions and gene activity between the low-asthma and high-asthma farming populations.
- Map open, regulatory DNA in the same immune cells using single-nucleus ATAC-seq to find regions of differential chromatin accessibility, test overlap with differently expressed genes, and identify enriched transcription factor binding motifs.
- Identify which immune cell types express genes at childhood-onset asthma risk loci, and where farm-environment-linked chromatin differences overlap these loci, by integrating the multi-omic datasets with asthma genetics.
More about the research
Comparing two U.S. farming communities offers a natural experiment. Amish children grow up around barn animals and their microbes and rarely have asthma. Hutterite children live on industrialized farms without that exposure and have more than four times as much asthma.
Why it matters
Asthma is the most common chronic respiratory illness and the most common chronic childhood illness. Revealing how early-life farm exposures reshape immune cells to protect against asthma could uncover new mechanisms of immune regulation. These mechanisms could eventually point toward new ways to prevent or treat childhood asthma.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
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The school
University of Chicago: 39 labs on PI Pages, $681M a year on research, 457 research doctorates a year.
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