Simran Bhutia
Pronouns: She/Her
Research Mentor(s): Helen Rich
Co-Presenter:
Research Mentor School/College/Department: Microbiology & Immunology / Medicine
Presentation Date: April 20
Presentation Type: Poster
Session: Session 5 – 3:40pm – 4:30 pm
Room: League Ballroom
Authors: Simran Bhutia, Helen Rich
Presenter: 22
Abstract
Influenza is a major cause of mortality, killing around 30,000 to 40,000 people each year in the United States. Previous research about the 1912 pandemic found that around 90-95% of people who died from the 1918 pandemic had bacterial co-infection largely from Streptococcus pneumoniae or Staphylococcus aureus (Morens et al. 2008). This problem of bacterial coinfection is still a concern today. 40% of pediatric deaths from flu during 2010-2016 stem from bacterial co-infection (Shang et al. 2018). Moreover, antibiotics are becoming a less effective treatment as drug-resistant bacteria like MRSA are becoming more common. It is important that future research in this area focuses on immunological changes that occur in co-infection to develop effective therapeutics. Research shows that the removal of the bacterial DNA sensor Toll-Like Receptor 9 (TLR9) surprisingly lowers morbidity and mortality during co-infection in mice models (MartÃnez-Colón et al. 2019). Previous experiments have shown that structural cells not having TLR9 correlated with the lower morbidity and mortality seen in whole-body TLR9 knockout (TLR9KO) mice during bacterial coinfection. From this observation, we hypothesized that losing TLR9 in the lung epithelium would change epithelial cell expression of antibacterial cytokines and antimicrobial peptides. To investigate this, we extracted alveolar epithelial cells from wild type (WT) and TLR9KO mice, and infected them with influenza ex vivo overnight. Then, RNA was extracted from those cells and assayed for expression of cytokine and antimicrobial peptide genes by real-time qPCR. Surprisingly, the TLR9KO epithelial cells actually expressed lower amounts of antimicrobial peptides. These results do not agree with the whole lung antimicrobial peptide expression as these values showed an increase in those genes. From these results, it seems that there is another cell type that is involved in the protection that TLR9KO mice have.
Biomedical Sciences, Interdisciplinary, Natural/Life Sciences
