Overview:
Investigated how gut microbiota-derived metabolites and host signaling pathways regulate blood pressure and cardiometabolic health using physiological, molecular, and multi-omics approaches.
Research Highlights:
Identified microbiota-dependent mechanisms influencing hypertension.
Investigated bile acid signaling in cardiovascular regulation.
Integrated transcriptomics, proteomics, metabolomics, & lipidomics to assess the regulation of gut metabolic health.
Techniques:
CRISPR/Cas9 gene-edited rat models
Rodent handling and
RNA-seq
Proteomics
Metabolomics
ELISA
Western Blotting
qRT-PCR
Cecal Microbiota Transplantation
Inflammation and Infection Monitoring
Bioinformatics and pathway enrichment analysis
Physiological phenotyping
Why it matters?
Understanding how gut microbiota and metabolic signaling regulate hypertension may lead to novel therapeutic strategies for cardiovascular and metabolic diseases.
Overview:
Investigated how the ketone body β-hydroxybutyrate (BHB) regulates metabolic syndrome and hypertension through epigenetic chromatin remodeling. Using multi-omics approaches, this work uncovered molecular mechanisms linking ketone metabolism to improved metabolic and cardiovascular health.
Research Highlights:
Identified histone β-hydroxybutyrylation (H3K9bhb) as a novel epigenetic mechanism of BHB lowering hypertension, metabolic syndrome, and kidney disease.
Discovered that chromatin remodeling simultaneously promotes energy metabolism while suppressing inflammatory and immune-associated genes in the kidney.
Integrated epigenomics, transcriptomics, and proteomics to demonstrate coordinated regulation of metabolic and immune pathways.
Provided mechanistic evidence explaining the cardiometabolic and renoprotective benefits of ketone body supplementation.
Techniques:
Rodent models of metabolic syndrome and hypertension
Ketone body supplementation (1,3-butanediol)
Radiotelemetry surgery and blood pressure monitoring
Histone post-translational modification analysis
Chromatin accessibility analysis
qRT-PCR
Proteomics data analysis
Western blotting
Multi-omics data integration
Statistical analysis using R
Why it matters?
Lifestyle interventions such as exercise, intermittent fasting, and ketogenic diets consistently improve cardiometabolic health, but the molecular mechanisms underlying these benefits remain incompletely understood. My research demonstrated that β-hydroxybutyrate acts as an epigenetic regulator that remodels chromatin to coordinate metabolic and immune gene expression. These findings establish a mechanistic link between ketone metabolism and improved metabolic and cardiovascular health, while supporting the development of ketone-based therapeutic strategies for individuals with metabolic syndrome, hypertension, and chronic kidney disease who may be unable to achieve sufficient lifestyle modifications.
Overview:
Developed machine learning models using human gut microbiome sequencing data to investigate microbial signatures associated with cardiovascular disease (CVD) and inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) and evaluate their potential for non-invasive disease screening.
Research Highlights:
Identified gut microbial taxa associated with CVD and IBD.
Built and compared five supervised machine learning models for CVD and IBD prediction.
Improved predictive performance through feature selection of microbial biomarkers.
Demonstrated the potential of gut microbiome-based diagnostics for CVD and IBD.
Techniques:
Microbiome bioinformatics
Machine learning (Random Forest, Neural Networks, SVM, Decision Tree, Elastic Net)
Feature selection
ROC/AUC analysis
R
Why it matters?
This work highlights the potential of combining gut microbiome profiling with machine learning to develop non-invasive, data-driven diagnostic tools for CVD and IBD and advance precision medicine approaches for early disease detection.