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    Tropini Lab

    Research Focus Teams: Aging, Alzheimer's, Autism, Cancer, Crohn's and Colitis, Diabetes, Obesity, Rare Diseases

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    Lab Team

    Carolina Tropini

    Assistant Professor

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    Adel Yavarinasab

    PhD Student

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    Alex Pei

    Undergraduate Student

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    Alice Hong

    Undergraduate Student

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    Angele Arrieta

    Lab Technician, Tropini Lab

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    Apsara Srinivas

    PhD Student

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    Asmita Jain

    Undergraduate Student

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    Brian Deng

    Undergraduate Student

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    Claire Sie

    PhD Student

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    Daniela Yanez Ortuno

    PhD Student

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    Deanna Pepin

    Postdoctoral Fellow, Tropini Lab

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    Ellie Mccallum

    PhD Student

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    Samples in the lab being handled.
    Gaurav Patial

    Gnotobiotic Care Tech

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    Hans Ghezzi

    PhD Student

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    Imogen Porter

    Masters Student

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    Jerry He

    PhD Student

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    John Nomellini

    Undergraduate Lab Program Manager

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    Juan Burckhardt

    PhD Student

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    Jung Hee

    Gnotobiotic Care Tech

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    Michael Hunter

    Postdoctoral Fellow, Tropini Lab

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    Natalia Carranza Garcia

    Animal Care Tech

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    Ongoing Projects

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    Osmotic and Other Physical Perturbations

    Osmotic diarrhea is a prevalent condition, caused by food intolerance, celiac disease, and widespread use of laxatives. Previous work has shown that, during osmotic diarrhea, there is increased susceptibility to infection by pathogens, indicating that disrupted abiotic conditions may have detrimental effects on key microbiota functions, including colonization resistance. In previous work we have shown that osmotic diarrhea disrupts the colonic environment, leads to extinction of key bacterial families, and decreases microbial diversity. We seek to discover the mechanisms involved in microbiota resilience to osmotic perturbation due to osmotic diarrhea by determining the behavior of key microbial families in clinical samples and then testing specific mechanisms in the laboratory.

    Phage Dynamics

    One of the ways that bacterial community dynamics are affected during abiotic perturbations is through changes in the infective and reproductive abilities of viruses that infect bacteria, known as bacteriophages or phages. Although phages are the most abundant organisms on Earth, we know very little about the complexities of the relationship between them and their bacterial hosts, particularly in the context of abiotic perturbations. Understanding the molecular mechanisms underlying this interaction is essential to understanding microbial communities associated with various hosts and environments. Our lab aims to unravel the bacterial as well as phage-dependent mechanisms by which phage infection is resilient to environmental perturbations.

    Gut microbiota and abiotic environmental conditions in IBD

    The varying abiotic intestinal microenvironment (pH, osmolality, mucus availability) in inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) restricts the ability of certain bacteria to grow in the gut, thereby limiting fecal microbiota transplant (FMT) efficacy. We know very little about the mechanisms of interplay between the gut microbiota and abiotic environmental conditions in IBD. Our objectives are therefore to 1) determine how the IBD microbiota changes the abiotic gut environment and 2) predict and engineer the ability of microbial members from healthy subjects to colonize an altered IBD gut environment and ameliorate it. By characterizing the luminal environment (pH, osmolality, mucus and bacterial components) from IBD models and human biopsies and using in vitro and bioengineering approaches combined with computational analysis we aim to create a predictive model of the interplay between gut environment and microbial communities in IBD. This understanding is necessary to improve treatment efficacy and to develop novel personalized IBD therapies.