Understanding microbial shifts and how they affect vaccine response is central to this study. We will determine if gut microbial communities associated with breastfeeding in the HEU infant follows the same successional trajectory as HU controls and resolve the differences at functional level. How the continuous conditioning of the infant gut by the microbiota from the breast milk affects the infant microbiome and subsequent

The goal of the proposed work is to characterize the transgenerational genomic impact of genocide exposure and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in women survivors of the Rwandan genocide and their offspring. PTSD is a common and debilitating mental disorder that has a profound public health impact. Between April and June 1994, almost one million people died in the Rwandan genocide against ethnic Tutsi.

This collaborative project, between Emory University in the USA and the University of Cape Town (UCT) in South Africa, proposes to investigate biological mechanisms underlying the transgenerational effects of exposure to prenatal maternal psychological stress, anxiety, or depression. We propose to examine

Antibodies are critical components of immune defense and are mediators of vaccine-elicited protection as well as autoimmunity. The heavy and light chains that comprise an antibody molecule are encoded by germline immunoglobulin (Ig) gene fragments that recombine and undergo somatic mutation thereby generating billions of specificities able to contend with a multitude of foreign antigens.