GCIR member: Simone Becattini

Simone Becattini is a principal investigator and assistant professor at the Department of Pathology and Immunology, Faculty of Medicine at the University of Geneva. He received his PhD in Immunology in 2015 from ETH Zurich for work conducted at the Biomedical Research Institute in Bellinzona, Switzerland, where he studied the heterogeneity of human CD4+ memory T cells primed by infections or vaccination. He then moved to New York for a postdoctoral training at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, where he expanded his interests to mucosal immunology, gut microbiota, and host-microbe interactions. In 2020, he was awarded an Eccellenza Professorial Fellowship from the Swiss National Science Foundation and was recruited as an assistant professor at the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Geneva. His laboratory is interested in understanding the intricate relationship existing between intestinal microbes and the host immune system, and in exploiting the underlying principles to fight infectious and inflammatory diseases.

PRESENTATION SUMMARY

Host-microbe interactions in the intestine: implications for immunity and disease

The gut microbiota is a complex collection of microbes that inhabit the gastrointestinal tract of virtually all metazoans, heavily impacting their physiology. Intestinal microbes establish symbiosis with their hosts through a bidirectional dialogue with the underlying immune system, with which they continuously exchange chemical cues. While many of the signals that our immune cells receive from these microbial communities have been elucidated, how immune cues impact the functions of the microbiota is largely unknown. We are addressing this important question by employing mice reconstituted with reductionist bacterial consortia, and administering them with immune stimuli that recapitulate downstream events typical of physiological as well as pathological immune responses. By analyzing changes in gene expression in the commensal communities, we are identifying how specific immune cues modulate the functions and metabolic output of intestinal bacteria. With ex vivo experiments conducted in anaerobic conditions, we are testing the effect of individual host mediators on bacterial transcriptomes and metabolomes, thus dissecting multiple host-microbe axes without the need for extensive utilization of animals. Dedicated bacterial engineering is allowing us to test the impact of the identified bacterial genes on bacterial adaptation to inflammatory stimuli and ultimately host health. Our experiments are paving the way for the rational design of therapeutic approaches exploiting the immune-microbiota axis to promote health in different disease scenarios.

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