How do mom's microbes affect pregnancy outcomes? UAB research aims to find out

As a baby slides out of the birth canal, on the way to its first breath, its body becomes coated in its mother’s microbes. This first interaction with outside organisms could be key to shaping the development of the baby’s immune system.

Our microbes, collectively called the microbiome, most often live in harmony with our bodies. They support the immune system, help to digest food and keep the metabolism on track, and fight off disease-causing bacteria. But researchers suspect that mom’s microbiome could play a role in when her children are born, and what happens to them as they grow.

“Most people know about the microbes that colonize the gut,” says Rodney Edwards, M.D., an associate professor in UAB’s Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology. “But there are bugs in and on us in many other sites—our skin, our mouths, our noses, our genitalia.”

During pregnancy, it turns out, the new needs and demands of a woman’s body change the numbers and types of these microbes. Alterations in how the body divvies up nutrients, stores fat, and produces hormones shift the properties of the microbes’ environments. But exactly how the microbiome changes over this nine-month period varies between pregnancies. And these variations, researchers are discovering, could impact not only the well being of a pregnant women herself, but the likelihood of pregnancy complications and the long-term health of a baby.

Tools of the Trade: Scanning Electron Microscope

The high-tech look of UAB's Scanning Electron Microscope facility makes it a popular spot on campus tours, but the machine's ability to image everything from exotic metals to living tissues makes it an invaluable research tool, says facility director William Stonewall Monroe (above).

When you need to see something so tiny that light skips right over it—and you don't want it vacuum-sealed and messed with in the way that a transmission electron microscope requires—you're in the market for a scanning electron microscope (SEM).

An SEM is the go-to machine for materials engineers, who are very interested in close-up pictures of faulty pipes or the inner workings of exotic, lab-created composites. That's why UAB's SEM is located on the ground floor of the School of Engineering. But the device is also gaining a following with researchers all over campus, says William Stonewall Monroe, director of the UAB Scanning Electron Microscope facility.

"If you want to look inside something, you use a transmission electron microscope," Monroe says. "That's what most people think of as an electron microscope. But the samples have to be elaborately prepared and able to survive the vacuum conditions."

A Parkinson's therapy makes its way through the "valley of death"

Andrew West is pursuing a compound to inhibit LRRK2, an enzyme that appears to be a central enabler
of the brain cell death seen in Parkinson's disease.

In its long journey from the petri dish to the first human patient, every new drug has to cross a wasteland called the "valley of death." Therapeutic programs enter, but most don’t come out the other side.

"The government is good at funding basic research to identify drug targets, and Big Pharma is good at taking drugs and putting them through clinical trials," says Andrew West, Ph.D., John A. and Ruth R. Jurenko Endowed Professor in Neurology at UAB. "But all of the in-between work, the pre-clinical and drug development components, is called the 'valley of death' for research, because nobody funds it, nobody pays attention to it. That's a big part of the lack of new drugs."

In fact, less than 10 percent of drugs that make it into preclinical testing will end up getting FDA approval, according to the agency's figures. But West is part of a new approach to the drug-discovery process designed to upend those odds: a partnership between UAB and Birmingham-based Southern Research Institute known as the Alabama Drug Discovery Alliance (ADDA).

The Mix Quiz: Are You Smarter Than a Medical Resident?

Just like you, doctors love their smartphones. And they like playing games. But a new game pioneered at the UAB School of Medicine has lots more ROI than Farmville.

It's called Kaizen, a word borrowed from the Japanese auto industry that means something like "continuous improvement." This Web-based quiz game challenges medical residents at the School of Medicine's campuses in Birmingham and Huntsville with two questions every day. They're brief scenarios meant to highlight key practice skills and new evidence-based findings from a range of specialties.

Learn all about Kaizen in this feature from UAB Magazine. And test your medical knowledge with our five-question quiz.

Hit man: A suspect emerges in the chaos of aggressive brain cancer

New research from UAB oncologist Markus Bredel identifies the splicing enzyme PTBP1 as a key factor
in the spread of glioblastoma multiforme.  

Glioblastoma multiforme is one of the deadliest human cancers. "The tumor can double in size within a few weeks," says Markus Bredel, M.D., Ph.D., a professor in the UAB Department of Radiation Oncology and senior scientist in the neuro-oncology program at the UAB Comprehensive Cancer Center. "Usually, by the time we see a patient, they often have apple-size lesions."

That explosive growth "comes with a substantial amount of genetic chaos," Bredel says. "If you look at the whole genome in a brain tumor, out of the 30,000 genes, you very often have changes in up to 50 percent; they're up or down, lost, amplified, mutated."

A Change for the Worse

Markus Bredel

But in that chaos, patterns emerge with surprising regularity, Bredel says. "When Gene A is up, Gene B is very often down." In two papers published in JAMA in 2009, Bredel's research team argued that "there needs to be a reason why glioblastomas co-select for certain genetic events. The tumor cells must benefit."

In those papers, Bredel's lab identified dozens of gene-gene links that were candidates for additional scrutiny. They focused on one particular pair: The oncogene EGFR, or epidermal growth factor receptor, which is crucial for normal cell growth and wound healing, and the tumor-suppressor ANXA7 or annexin A7. EGFR is of interest in many cancers, because it is often hijacked to fuel the aggressive growth of tumor cells.

"We found that ANXA7 is probably a regulator of EGFR," Bredel says. "So it's to the benefit of the tumor cell to knock down this regulator." But it wasn't clear at the time how this was happening. "ANXA7 resides on a different chromosome from EGFR, so it's a completely independent event, but somehow the tumor cells were disabling it," says Bredel.

Speed metal: This nano-discovery is a really big deal

UAB researchers and colleagues have created an ultrafast, ultratiny on-off switch out of vanadium dioxide, a material that could be the future of high-tech. But before we get there, we'll probably need to answer this question: What in the world is vanadium dioxide, anyway?

What's the fastest thing you can imagine? How about the smallest?

Well never mind, because there really is no way to wrap your head around what's going on in David Hilton's laser lab in the UAB Department of Physics.

That is to say, you're about to find out what's going on, and it's amazing stuff. Hilton and one of his graduate students, Nate Brady, are hot on the trail of what might be the magic material of the 21st century: vanadium dioxide. This strange, manmade material could be the successor to silicon, paving the way to ultrafast, ultrasmall switches that will make the current information superhighway look like a slow drive down a country road.

But all this is happening so quickly that it staggers the brain.

Video selfies offer a new way to teach chemistry

Can making movies make you a better chemist? UAB chemistry professor Joe March (left) and graduate student Mitzy Erdmann (right) have proven that it does. Their research-tested approach is now implemented across UAB's introductory General Chemistry curriculum.

Hollywood has nothing on the UAB Department of Chemistry. While Tinseltown studios generate some 600 movies per year, students in the university's General Chemistry course produce nearly that many each semester.

"Avatar" this is not. Each video clocks in at five minutes or less and follows a strict formula:

SCENE 1, DAY

OPEN in a UAB chemistry lab. THREE or FOUR students take turns demonstrating a fundamental lab technique. Each speaks directly to the camera while they explain how to use a balance, how to pipette, or how to do an accurate titration.

There is no scene 2.

The teaching assistants who grade dozens of these videos each year may relish the occasional creative approaches, such as the group who adopted a "Star Wars" theme (see below), or the ones who broke for commercials. But entertainment isn't the idea. Call it sci (non)fi.