University of California Irvine
Dr. Katrine Whiteson is an Associate Professor at University of California Irvine and the co-Director of the UCI Microbiome Center. She studied Biochemistry at UC Berkeley (BA) and University of Chicago (PhD), and did post-docs at the University of Geneva Hospitals with Jacques Schrenzel (MD) and at San Diego State University with Forest Rohwer (PhD). Her lab at UCI studies the human microbiome in health and disease. This has them hunting for bacteria, fungi and viruses in feces, sewage, sputum and other well-loved samples - the students are brave! Long term, she envisions a world where microbiome science can be an integrated component of solutions for health and environmental problems.
She has been investigating polymicrobial infections in Cystic Fibrosis for 13 years, initially with culture independent ‘omics approaches and now also using in vitro cultivation models to investigate community interactions and phage therapy potential, especially for Stenotrophomonas maltophilia. She has organized a bi-annual Ecology and Evolution focused CF microbiology workshop in Telluride, CO throughout this time as well. While working with Doug Conrad at UCSD, Dr. Whiteson discovered microbial fermentation products including 2,3-butanedione (aka diacetyl, well known as the major flavoring in microwave popcorn) as a product of oral microbial metabolism. Oral microbes are often dismissed as unimportant to the pathogenesis of infection in CF, however, toxic anaerobic fermentation products are often volatile, and can travel throughout the airways impacting the physiology or human and other microbial cells. A longstanding collaboration Prof. John LiPuma at Univ. of Michigan has had NIH and Cystic Fibrosis Foundation (CFF) funding to profile and analyze metabolites in daily longitudinal samples and as part of the CFF “STOP2” clinical trial comparing antibiotic treatment duration that includes 60 clinics across North America. The data may be most useful for characterizing the metabolomic and microbial signatures of successful antibiotic treatment, and the sputum sample collection and analysis is especially valuable in the new era of channel modifying drugs, which are improving health and quality of life for people with CF so dramatically that even collecting sputum is rare.
Saturday, September 28, 2024
7:45 AM – 9:45 AM ET