Adviser: Dr. Katherine Amato
Subject: Life Sciences
DOI: 10.21985/n2-zaxn-6h66
Madelyn Moy is a rising senior at Northwestern (class of 2022) who is originally from Chicago, IL. She has majors in Biological Sciences, Anthropology, and Integrated Science and a minor in Chinese. She has been conducting research at Northwestern since her freshman year in Dr. Katherine Amato’s laboratory, where she studies the gut microbiome of human and non-human primates. Her most recent project focuses on the understanding the relationship between inflammation, pregnancy, and the gut microbiome of women from Cebu, Philippines. In addition to working in the Amato laboratory, she previously worked in Dr. Sui Huang’s laboratory at Northwestern’s Feinberg School of Medicine, where she worked on second generation analogues of the anti-cancer drug metarrestin. This summer, she is working in Dr. Wendy Garrett’s laboratory at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, where she is investigating the relationship between upper gastrointestinal tract eosinophils and the microbiome in mouse models. For her research, Madelyn has been funded through Northwestern’s Office of Undergraduate Research Summer Undergraduate Research Grant, presented at several conferences, and been awarded the Goldwater Scholarship. After graduation, she hopes to attend graduate school and pursue a career in research.
[/et_pb_text][/et_pb_column][et_pb_column type=”3_5″ _builder_version=”3.23.3″][et_pb_text _builder_version=”3.23.3″ text_font=”Standard2|600|||||||” text_font_size=”25px”]Abstract[/et_pb_text][et_pb_text _builder_version=”3.23.3″ text_font=”Times New Roman||||||||” text_font_size=”19px” text_line_height=”1.5em”]During pregnancy, mothers undergo a range of physiological changes including shifting hormone levels, modified immune function, and reduced gut motility. These changes are necessary to meet the pregnant mother’s increased energy needs and inhibit rejection of the fetus. The gut microbiota (GM) – the community of microorganisms that live in the digestive tract – is theorized to play a role in the production and regulation of the immune system. As a result, the GM is theorized to mediate immune changes during pregnancy. Because the exact nature of this relationship is unknown, my project investigated how the GM and markers of immune function differ during pregnancy by focusing on the fecal samples and blood spots of pregnant and non-pregnant women from Cebu, Philippines. By conducting 16s rRNA bacterial gene sequencing, preliminary data indicates that pregnancy does not have a significant effect on the GM for this dataset, which is contradictory to previous research. Furthermore, immune marker assays did not show differences between pregnant and non-pregnant women. Since previous research on both immune function and the GM during pregnancy has focused on American and European populations, this project contributes to limited data on how the relationship between these factors may vary across populations. Ultimately, this research can improve our understanding of the factors driving pregnancy outcomes and can inform the development of microbial techniques to treat immune diseases.[/et_pb_text][/et_pb_column][/et_pb_row][/et_pb_section][et_pb_section fb_built=”1″ _builder_version=”3.23.3″][et_pb_row _builder_version=”3.23.3″][et_pb_column type=”4_4″ _builder_version=”3.23.3″][et_pb_code _builder_version=”3.23.3″][/et_pb_code][/et_pb_column][/et_pb_row][et_pb_row _builder_version=”3.23.3″][et_pb_column type=”4_4″ _builder_version=”3.23.3″][et_pb_code _builder_version=”3.23.3″][/et_pb_code][/et_pb_column][/et_pb_row][/et_pb_section]