Alice Kane

Nobel Prize winner Mary Brunkow on immune system research Mary Brunkow was awarded the 2025 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, along with Fred Ramsdell and Shimon Sakaguchi, for their "groundbreaking discoveries concerning peripheral immune tolerance tha...

Great primer from #NobelPrize winner Dr. Mary Brunkow on @npr.org's Here & Now: how FOXP3 and T regs help keep the immune system from harming the body. (~6 min) @wbur.org
🎧 www.wbur.org/hereandnow/2...

Multiomics Reveals Compartmentalized Immune Responses and Tissue-Vascular Signatures in Lyme Disease Lyme disease (LD) is growing in incidence, with nearly 500,000 cases diagnosed annually in the United States. Despite treatment, some patients experience persistent symptoms. The immune mechanisms underlying LD remain poorly understood. We conducted a multiomic longitudinal analysis of 49 LD patients and matched controls, integrating plasma proteomics, metabolomics, PBMC immunophenotyping, and a meta-analysis of skin lesions. We identified compartmentalized immune responses in acute LD, with coordinated alterations in circulating plasma proteins and metabolites linked to endothelial barrier stability, metabolic reprogramming, and symptom severity, predominantly traced to tissue and vascular immune processes at the site of infection. In contrast, PBMCs remained largely quiescent, revealing a disconnect between localized tissue responses and systemic immunity. These findings provide novel insights into LD pathophysiology and highlight the potential for diagnostics leveraging tissue and vascular immune markers detectable in blood. They also provide a resource for biomarker discovery and predictive modeling to improve LD management. ### Competing Interest Statement CR, AB, HH, LP, MEB, DC, CL, ASA, BS, KS, PT, KW, NR, LH, and NS declare no competing financial interests. GPW reports receiving research grants from Biopeptides Corp., has served as an expert witness in malpractice cases involving Lyme disease, and is an unpaid board member of the non-profit American Lyme Disease Foundation. United States Department of Defense, https://ror.org/0447fe631, W81XWH2110664 Wilke Family Foundation Steven and Alexandra Cohen Foundation Global Lyme Alliance, https://ror.org/05tzrqq19

Why do current diagnostics struggle to detect Lyme disease? Our new preprint reveals highly localized immune responses: tissue and vascular responses dominate, while peripheral activation is minimal.
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
#LymeDisease #Multiomics #Immunology
A thread ⬇️

Metabolomics biomarkers of frailty: a longitudinal study of aging female and male mice - npj Aging npj Aging - Metabolomics biomarkers of frailty: a longitudinal study of aging female and male mice

Check out our new paper about metabolite biomarkers for frailty in mice. Age- and frailty-related metabolites are different and present sex dimorphisms www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Thanks to @alicekane.bsky.social @judywbio.bsky.social & other authors

Multiomic clocks to predict phenotypic age in mice Biological age refers to a person's overall health in aging, as distinct from their chronological age. Diverse measures of biological age, referred to as clocks, have been developed in recent years an...

Check out our latest preprint on the development of clocks to predict PhenoAge in mice! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Call for Papers Animal Models of Frailty Biological Sciences section of The Journals of Gerontology, Series A Guest Editor: Susan E. Howlett, PhD, Dalhousie University, Halif

@susanehowlett.bsky.social Susan Howlett and I are co-editing a special issue of JGBS on Animal Models of Frailty 🐒🐶🐭🐀 - reach out if you would like to contribute! academic.oup.com/biomedgeront...

Great work from the lab of @bbparis1984.bsky.social !

This Friday, 11:30-1 and in-person, @isbscience.org's @alicekane.bsky.social will present The Biology of Aging: Bridging Frailty and Health Outcomes, offering insights into how aging affects health & function. Register: www.eventbrite.com/e/2024-2025-...

2025 Study section tracking

Wondering if your study section cancelled? I update this sheet daily. As of today, 56/124 study sections that should have met since Jan 2, 2025 have "not met as scheduled." docs.google.com/spreadsheets...

Data request! Do you assess frailty index in your aging C57 mouse studies? @dantong-zhu.bsky.social is making new and improved clocks to predict age and lifespan based on frailty data & we aim to validate widely! Reach out if you want to collaborate 🐀👵⏰ Especially if you have female data + lifespan!

Introducing "Metagenomic Estimation of Dietary Intake", or "MEDI": a data-driven approach to estimating dietary and nutritional intake from stool DNA 💩 - 🍌🥦🐟🥩📈

See @cdiener.com's excellent thread below.

We are really proud of this work, and we hope it is useful to the scientific community.

Metagenomic estimation of dietary intake from human stool - Nature Metabolism Diener et al. present a method that allows the estimation of dietary intake from human stool by detecting food-derived DNA in faecal metagenomes.

Happy to announce that MEDI, our method to quantify dietary intake through metagenomics is out now. 🧬 🧪🧫🦠 www.nature.com/articles/s42...

#metagenomics #microbiome #microbiomesky

So what is MEDI? A combination of two things:

Interested in doing a PhD in Austria focused on understanding how to engineer the composition of the gut microbiota?

Want to work with a brilliant computational biologist and microbiome researcher?

See below!

The Dog Aging Project is an innovative research initiative that brings together a community of dogs, owners, veterinarians, researchers, and volunteers to carry out the most ambitious canine health study in the world.
dogagingproject.org

🌟 Join us in Anchorage, Alaska for the AGE 53rd Annual Meeting: New Frontiers in Aging Research! 🌟

This is an event you won’t want to miss!

📅 Save the Date & Be Part of the Conversation!

Metabolomics biomarkers of frailty: a longitudinal study of aging female and male mice Frailty is an age related geriatric syndrome, for which the mechanisms remain largely unknown. We performed a longitudinal study of aging female (n = 40) and male (n = 47) C57BL/6NIA mice, measured fr...

Metabolomics biomarkers of frailty: a longitudinal study of aging female and male mice

"...In summary, our results identify sex-specific metabolite biomarkers of frailty in aging, and shed light on potential mechanisms involved in frailty"

@alicekane.bsky.social

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Biological sex matters in brain aging

Biological sex is a key modifier of #aging phenotypes, including #Brain 🧠 aging.
See this piece out today in #Neuron, spearheaded by @denadubal.bsky.social, co-authored by #YousinSuh, @ctmurphy1.bsky.social and myself on the topic:
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
#GeroSky #SexDifferences

Sex dimorphism and tissue specificity of gene expression changes in aging mice - Biology of Sex Differences Background Aging is a complex process that involves all tissues in an organism and shows sex dimorphism. While transcriptional changes in aging have been well characterized, the majority of studies ha...

Check out the first publication from the Kane lab @isbscience.org! RNAseq analysis of sex differences in aging across tissues - spoiler alert - there are lots of them! bsd.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.... Congratulations and thans to @dantong-zhu.bsky.social, @judywbio.bsky.social & other authors.

So so helpful, thank you!

Looking to hire a postdoc who is excited about epigenetics and aging! ISB is an incredible place to work, and Seattle is great! Plus Washington postdoc salaries are 👌 Come join us! isbscience.hrmdirect.com/employment/j...