Associate Professor at UIUC | HK | Microbial Systems Initiative | Integrative Microbiota Physiology Lab
Joined April 2020
- Tweets 613
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28 Photos and videos
Pinned Tweet
7 Jun 2024
šØInterested in why fermented foods may be important for health? Check out our new pub describing a class of microbial metabolites that are abundant in fermented foods and are modifiable to enhance food matrix bioactivity towards a key immune receptor-AhR
sciencedirect.com/science/arā¦
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What a treat it was to have @Mucus_Man visit @IGBIllinois yesterday! Great to steal him away from his shrimp experiments for a day and hear about his labs exciting new science (Mucus and non-mucus related) Not surprising that some cool new stories are coming out soon!
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Jacob Allen retweeted
Jan 26
A new study by @IlliniHealthKin researchers has identified a pathway by which social stress can worsen symptoms of inflammatory bowel diseaseāa commonly reported phenomenon for those with IBD.
Read the full story ā”ļø go.ahs.illinois.edu/StressCoā¦
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Breaking the X hiatus for a New Paper Alert šØ
We describe how Social stress increases IBD susceptibility in mice via adrenergic signaling and epithelial ROS.
Huge congrats to the whole team & espec. Elisa Caetano-Silva for leading the charge!
@AHSIllinois pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/4141ā¦
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Jacob Allen retweeted
18 Dec 2025
šOur paper officially published w/ @JacobAllenPhD and team!šš
Social stress worsens colitis through Ī²-adrenergicādriven oxidative stress in intestinal mucosal compartments: Ī²-adrenergic and ROS pathways as therapeutic targets for stress-exacerbated IBD.
sciencedirect.com/science/arā¦
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19 Aug 2025
Fun day with the lab celebrating ā¦@MikaelaK_RDā© PhD and arrival of new student Eleanor Eck! See Mikaelaās new lab coat with some fermented food āblingāā¦ I focused on design, but I forgot about the size (an XXLā¦ Mikaela is 5 ft 2ā¦ š¬). Correct size is inbound :)
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19 Aug 2025
Check out the commentary I wrote on some cool new metagenomic workflows from Elisa Caffrey and the Sonnenburg lab. New ways to study fermented food microbes :). journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128ā¦
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Jacob Allen retweeted
15 Aug 2025
My paper is out in @ScienceMagazine!
We found a novel host defense strategy where #mitochondria, our domesticated microbes, compete with the intracellular pathogen #Toxoplasma for #folate.
science.org/doi/10.1126/scieā¦
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Jacob Allen retweeted
12 Aug 2025
What if we could use precision #microbiome editing in vivo to turn harmful gut microbes into allies against disease? We did it using #CRISPR Transposon & mobilome engineering. With @harriswangnyc and Tyler Perdue. In @natBME
š nature.com/articles/s41551-0ā¦
š innovativegenomics.org/news/ā¦
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Jacob Allen retweeted
29 Jul 2025
Just published!
Congrats to lead authors, Dalia Perelman & Elisa Caffrey, on publishing "Unpacking Food Fermentation" in Advances in Nutrition.
They explore what we know (and donāt) about fermented foods & why clearer definitions & research matter.
š pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articleā¦
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21 Jul 2025
šØ New preprint from the lab! We identify a link between sympathetic nervous system activity, gut epithelial ROS, and colitis susceptibility in mice, offering a potential mechanism for the well-known connection between stress and IBD in humans
š biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/ā¦
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21 Jul 2025
Led by the wonderful @elisacaetano__ ! Also thanks to all co-authors and collaborators like @DrHArmstrong, and all others (most not on X). Also this work not possible without @NIH @NIDDKgov funding! Much more to come when we post the 'official' pub :)
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1 Jul 2025
Huge congrats to the newly minted PhD @MikaelaK_RD! Mikaela helped pioneer our labās work on fermented foods and their impact on immune and metabolic pathways in the context of obesity. A joy to mentor and made my life easy. Well done, Dr. Kasperek! š„³šš½ļø
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11 Jun 2025
What an awesome #GutBrainAxis symposium at #PNIRS2025! Huge honor to co-chair with @Eli_melb and share the stage with Frank Duca and Allen Labās own Elisa Caetano-Silva. Incredible science and even better people. Thanks to everyone who joined us!
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Jacob Allen retweeted
10 Jun 2025
What are the ground truths on dietās impact on the gut microbiome? There are surprisingly few, but the ones that exist are remarkably robust.
You(r gut microbes) are what you eat...
Suzanne Devkota and colleagues describe the powerful role of diet in shaping the gut microbiome, particularly in the first year of life, and discuss the impact on human health and disease. jci.org/articles/view/184319
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Jacob Allen retweeted
15 May 2025
Wonderful day at the park with the Antonson Developmental Neuroimmunology Lab! š„°
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