Principal Investigator Barbara Imperiali
We collaborate with Prof. Linda Griffith in MIT’s Biological Engineering Department to apply chip-based flow devices to study the immune response of human gut intestinal epithelia to the GI pathogen Campylobacter jejuni. The strains we employ are competent or defective in glycosylation, and microbiological and chip-based experiments enable us to evaluate adhesion and invasion into host cells and tissues. In addition to co-culture of human and bacterial cells, we isolate and administer outer membrane vesicles (OMVs) secreted by C. jejuni. OMVs are used for delivery of virulence factors, host invasion, and immune response modulation and our goal is to understand the role that these vesicles play in virulence and to what extent N-linked glycosylation is implicated in C. jejuni pathogenicity.