Researchers at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa have been awarded $10.7 million from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to study how human health is impacted by exposure to microbes, how microbiomes are impacted by environmental and social-economic gradients in Hawaiʻi, and how an animal’s microbiome confers persistent health (using invertebrate hosts).
“We want to develop the best and the brightest of the next generation of researchers that are experts in studying environmental microbiomes and their interaction with humans,” said Principal Investigator Anthony Amend, a professor with the Pacific Biosciences Research Center (PBRC).
Building on Phase 1
The latest grant from the NIH Centers of Biomedical Research Excellence (COBRE) is considered a Phase 2 grant. Five years ago, a $10.4-million Phase 1 grant enabled the UH Mānoa Integrative Center for Environmental Microbiomes and Human Health (ICEMHH) to emerge as a recognized center of excellence in understanding the ways environmental microbiomes impact human health using approaches that range from the molecular and chemical to the ecological.
In addition to substantial scientific outputs, including 35 publications and more than $22 million in extramural investigator grants, Phase 1 investigators helped to establish world-class field sites on multiple islands that leverage Hawaiʻi’s uniquely steep environmental gradients, and to develop tractable, local, model host systems to understand microbiome impacts in host health and physiology.
COBRE Phase 2 builds upon Phase 1 and encompasses four research projects:
- Mohammad Arif, an assistant researcher in plant and environmental protection sciences, is studying sources of food-born pathogens and mechanisms of how they establish on crops.
- Ellinor Haglund, an assistant professor of chemistry, is researching microbiome interactions with the hormone leptin in Drosophila (fruit fly) obesity.
- Andrea Jani, an assistant researcher in PBRC is examining the interaction between microbiome and disease in Drosophila models.
- Corrie Miller, an assistant professor of obstetrics, gynecology and women’s health, is researching factors influencing the vaginal microbiome and its role in preterm births.
Life sciences at the heart
The “heart” of ICEMHH is the Isabella Aiona Abbott Life Sciences Building (LSB), which houses teaching and research labs, as well as three core facilities for microscopy, genomic analysis and an insectary. The building also holds the labs of five graduated, current and proposed COBRE researchers, as well as the core facility directors. Approximately 65% of the total research space is occupied by ICEMHH personnel and facilities.
“What the COBRE does is allow us to combine the ecology and then environmental diversity of Hawaiʻi and these Hawaiian systems with human health concepts,” said Jani. “That’s something that’s big and complex and that takes a lot of collaborative effort to do.”
Applications for infectious diseases
Jani’s lab is in the LSB. She is being mentored by Phase 1 researcher Joanne Yew, who also oversees the Microbial Genomics and Analytical Laboratory core facility.
“The COBRE energizes the state of microbiome research at the university,” Yew said. “So that means that it will attract people to come here and do microbiome research—attract and build the intellectual environment.”
Jani is researching how the fruit fly microbiome responds to infection.
“Fruit flies allow us to study this infection process of infectious disease, to understand conceptually what causes the microbiome to be stable or not stable in the face of infection,” Jani said. “And then we can take especially some of the ecological principles, the ecological factors that contribute to stability, and start to apply those to humans.”
Beyond direct advances to human and environmental health, the COBRE grant also benefits Hawaiʻi residents in other ways.
“Our Phase 1 investigators were awarded more than $22 million in external grants, mostly from federal agencies, and that all comes back to the state in terms of salaries and expertise,” said Amend. “It’s really a boon for—not just the university—but for the people of Hawaiʻi as well.”
—by Kelli Abe Trifonovitch
