Project Leads
The Problem
While modern HIV prevention and treatment have dramatically reduced the transmission of HIV from infected mothers to their infants, these children (also known as HIV exposed uninfected, or HEU) face much higher mortality rates than their HIV unexposed (HU) counterparts. Furthermore, HEU children have been shown to have different responses to vaccines than HU children. Finally, while it is known that breastfeeding these HEU children can improve their immune systems, it is unclear how this mechanism of protection operates, indicating that there is much to learn about the effect of breastmilk on the immune systems of HEU children.
Project Strategy
- To compare the microbes of breastmilk of mothers and gut microbiomes of infants (in both HIV+/HEU and HIV-/HU pairs) to understand the role of the breastmilk in child development.
- To investigate the immune response of vaccines in HEU and HU children, specifically monitoring how they affect microbial composition.
- To investigate the association between the genes of HEU children how their immune systems respond to vaccines.
Outcomes to Date
While the BEAMING project is in its infancy, the group has begun to lay the foundation upon which they will conduct their research in the coming years, establishing their core personnel and infrastructures that will efficiently enable them to execute out their strategy. Additionally, the project has made promising first steps into their key research aims with preliminary results indicating an effect of breastmilk microbiota on the gut microbiome of newborns. In the coming years, BEAMING will continue to make headway in answering their research questions, which could inform and influence public health policy in Africa and globally for generations to follow.
Project Sites
A: Nigeria
Institute of Human Virology
B: South Africa
University of Cape Town
Additional Resources
October 8, 2020
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
October 7, 2020
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.
October 6, 2020
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
October 1, 2020
Immunoglobulin Gene Diversity in an African Population and Impact Antibody Function in HIV Infection
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.
September 22, 2020
Hereditary neurological disorders are very disabling diseases that are under-studied in Africa. Our first aim is to clinically characterize these disorders in the Malian population in order to establish a comprehensive clinical description of the diseases in this region. Our second aim is to identify gene mutations related to neurological diseases, and to explore their effects in cell culture models to further our understanding of their function and interactions and our knowledge of
September 22, 2020
Developmental disorders are severe, chronic disabilities that are systematically increasing in prevalence in low-and middle-income countries. Due to the high burden of infectious disease in many African countries, active research into rare disorders such as DD has been neglected. The genetic aetiology of DD is complex and therefore traditional diagnostic tests have a low success yield.
August 18, 2020
African Female Breast Cancer Epidemiology (AFBRECANE) Study Project summary Breast cancer is the commonest cancer in women globally and it is increasingly overtaking cervical cancer as the commonest female cancer in low and middle income countries (LMIC). The incidence of breast cancer Nigeria was 54.3 per 100,000 per year (24,750 new cases per year) in 2014 representing a rise from 20 per 100,000 in the 1970s (3,000 new cases per year).
April 4, 2018
The goal of this multisite, collaborative project is to identify genes responsible for schizophrenia in the Xhosa population of South Africa. The vast majority of the genetic basis for schizophrenia has yet to be explained. Strong evidence suggests that individually rare, severely deleterious mutations are responsible for a substantial portion of cases.
April 4, 2018
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