Grant: Operating Grant

Our intestines host a community of bacteria that rival contemporary industrial nations in terms of population density, diversity, and output. This overlooked group joins us at birth and accompanies us to our death. In ideal situations, they make valuable contributions to our uptake of nutrients, direct the formation of essential structures in our guts, and orchestrate the immune defenses that protect us from deadly bacteria and viruses. However, environmental or genetic disruptions to the relationship between humans and their bacterial passengers have severe, and occasionally deadly, consequences. A breakdown in our tolerance of gut bacteria fuels the onset of inflammatory bowel diseases and is at the heart of several intestinal cancers. Researchers in my lab use the simple fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster as a convenient tool to examine the biological events that shape interactions between a host and their gut bacteria. Flies are surprisingly valuable for such studies for several reasons. Fundamental features of animal biology such as cell division, growth and immunity tend to be conserved across evolution. This means that discoveries in flies often guide our examination of medically relevant aspects of human biology. In addition, a century of groundbreaking advances generated sophisticated tools for the manipulation of gene activity in flies. In this study, we will examine the means by which immune responses in a fly gut direct interactions with their bacterial environment, and how disruptions to such interactions can lead to disease.