Eliseo Castillo
University of New Mexico, NM·Microbiology & Immunology
Plastic waste breaks down into microplastics, particles only micrometers across, which now contaminate food and water worldwide. Swallowing them has become unavoidable, yet how they affect human health is largely unknown.
- Fields
Microbiology & Immunology
Public Health & Epidemiology
Physiology
- Topics
microplastics
plastic pollution
environmental health
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Jun 2027
What they work on
- Determine how varying doses and types of microplastic particles alter intestinal permeability, meaning leakiness of the gut lining, using a zebrafish exposure model.
- Define the mechanism by which microplastics disrupt oxidative metabolism in intestinal epithelial cells and thereby cause gut dysbiosis and barrier leakiness.
- Test how an intact human intestinal lining responds to microplastics using colonoids, lab-grown miniature colon tissues, derived from both healthy donors and inflammatory bowel disease patients.
More about the research
The gut is the organ they contact most directly, and this project asks what repeated exposure does to it, both in generally healthy people and in those whose intestines are already inflamed, as in inflammatory bowel disease (IBD).
Why it matters
Microplastic ingestion is now near-universal, but its health consequences are poorly defined. This work could establish whether and how microplastics damage the intestinal barrier and microbiome, and whether people with inflammatory bowel disease are especially vulnerable, information that could guide environmental health risk assessment and efforts to counter microplastic-associated gut disease.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Philip Busbee
University of South Carolina-Columbia, SC·Microbiology & Immunology
Test whether eating microplastics of different sizes worsens depression-like behavior and markers of brain inflammation in mice with colitis induced by dextran sodium sulfate (DSS), a model of ulcerative colitis.
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.
Pawel Kiela
University of Arizona, AZ·Microbiology & Immunology
Determine whether loss of NAD+ or excess PARylation by the enzyme PARP1 is the main driver of experimental colitis, using PARP1 knockout mice and drug inhibition.
The school
University of New Mexico: 27 labs on PI Pages, $355M a year on research, 182 research doctorates a year.
Reach out
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