Carver College of Medicine Events
Women In Micro & Immuno Coffee Hour
Monday, November 10, 2025 11:00am to 12:00pm
Join us for the Women in Micro & Immuno Coffee Hour. It is the monthly coffee hour on the second Monday of the month from 11 a.m. to noon in 1289 CBRB. Enjoy coffee, pastries and contribute to the discussion!
This is open to ALL — students, staff, postdocs, and faculty interested in promoting women in science.
Speakers change monthly. Contact: jessica-tucker@uiowa.edu for details.
Department of Microbiology and Immunology Seminar Series
Monday, November 10, 2025 3:00pm to 4:00pm
Seminar Series https://microbiology.medicine.uiowa.edu/about-us/seminars
Hardin Open Workshops - EndNote Desktop (Zoom)
Tuesday, November 11, 2025 1:00am to 2:00pm
EndNote is a reference management tool that helps you to easily gather together your references in one place, organize them, and then insert them into papers and format them in a style of your choosing. This session will walk you through the basics of using EndNote to collect and format your citations. The class will be hands-on, and there will be time for questions at the end.
PLEASE NOTE
Enrollment in HOW is open to all University of Iowa affiliates and residents of the state of Iowa. Advance...
REDCap Advanced Training
Tuesday, November 11, 2025 10:00am to 11:00am
This is the fourth step in the REDCap training series. In this training we will cover advanced features such as:
Importing data from a CSV file Ways to customize your data entry experience with form display logic Making your forms more dynamic and personalized with context aware smart variables Sending automated, conditional email alerts Ensuring data is high quality by executing data quality rules, creating data 'missingness' codes, and opening data queriesRegister by clicking the...
Neuroscience and Pharmacology Seminar - Rong Grace Zhai, PhD
Tuesday, November 11, 2025 10:30am to 11:30am
Harnessing the Power of Drosophila for Therapeutic Discovery for Genetic Neuropathies
Rong Grace Zhai, PhD
Jack Miller Professor of Neurology
Vice Chair of Research
Department of Neurology
University of Chicago
Recent Articles from the University of Iowa
Atopic dermatitis, primary atopic disorders, and the cutaneous microbiome: current understanding of an expanding field
Monday, November 3, 2025
Atopic dermatitis is a common inflammatory skin disease with rapidly expanding worldwide prevalence. Increasingly, cases of severe and early-onset dermatitis have been identified and found to be due to underlying monogenic mutations, leading to immune dysregulation. These conditions, called primary atopic disorders, have become an area of extensive study over the last 30 years. Simultaneously, our understanding of the human microbiome has steadily grown, and there is clear evidence that...
The <em>Candida albicans</em> transcription factor Efg1 governs hyphal morphogenesis independently of the cAMP-protein kinase A pathway
Friday, October 31, 2025
Candida albicans is one of the most common causes of human fungal disease. An intensively studied C. albicans virulence traits is its ability to adopt both yeast and filamentous morphologies. Accordingly, the regulation of the yeast-to-filament transition has been an area of intense study in medical mycology. A long-standing mechanistic paradigm in this field is that the cAMP-protein kinase A pathway phosphorylates a master transcriptional regulator of C. albicans filamentation, Efg1, to drive...
T<sub>H</sub>1 effector CD4 T cells rely on IFN-γ production to induce alopecia areata
Friday, October 31, 2025
Alopecia areata (AA) is an autoimmune disease defined by hair loss and peribulbar infiltrate of CD8 and CD4 T cells. Prior studies have focused on the role of CD8 T cells in the development of AA. Multiple roles for CD4 T cell help have been demonstrated for support of CD8 T cell responses; however, the role of CD4 T cells in AA remains unclear. Here, we demonstrate that CD4 T cells from the skin-draining lymph nodes (SDLNs) of AA mice transferred disease to recipient mice. These cells exhibited...
Quantifying Nuance within Sepsis-Associated Immune Suppression toward Diagnostic Certainty
Thursday, October 30, 2025
Impact of sepsis on human T-cell function and outcome was assessed. In sepsis survivors, IFNγ-production in response to T-cell stimulation remains intact, while sepsis non-survivors display exaggerated IFNγ responses to TCR-independent stimuli.
ACE2-Mediated Infection of Immortalized Human Visceral Adipocytes by SARS-CoV-2
Wednesday, October 29, 2025
Adipocytes can be infected by SARS-CoV-2, potentially contributing to the obesity-associated severity of COVID-19. Circumstantial evidence points to angiotensin-converting enzyme 2 (ACE2) as the necessary receptor for adipocyte infection, but this has not been demonstrated experimentally. Using differentiated immortalized human preadipocyte lines that we developed, we found that visceral adipocytes express higher levels of ACE2 and are more susceptible to SARS-CoV-2 spike (S)-mediated...
iPSC-derived ITGA6-positive cells restore aqueous humor outflow in glaucoma eyes
Tuesday, October 28, 2025
Decreased trabecular meshwork (TM) cellularity is a critical pathogenic cause of primary open-angle glaucoma, yet therapies to regenerate the decellularized TM are very limited. Induced pluripotent stem cell-derived TM-like cells (iPSC-TM) can efficiently restore aqueous humor outflow. Here, we conducted a multi-modal RNA sequencing analysis to characterize the molecular mechanisms underlying TM regeneration. Our clustering analysis identified a group of iPSC-derived alpha6 integrin-positive...
Neutrophils are key modulators of sex differences in LPS-induced shock in mice
Tuesday, October 28, 2025
Lipopolysaccharide (LPS) exposure in mice induces robust morbidity and mortality, and is widely used as a model for sepsis. However, the role of biological sex in modulating immune responses during LPS-induced sepsis remains incompletely understood. In this study, we investigated how sex influences immune responses following LPS challenge in mice. Using age-matched mice, we found that during primary LPS challenge, females exhibited significantly higher mortality than males. This difference...
Prostaglandin D2 axis impairs immunity against melanoma via dendritic cells and γδ T cells in middle-aged mice
Tuesday, October 28, 2025
The risk of developing melanoma increases with age. Although immune checkpoint blockade (ICB) therapy has shown considerable success, a significant portion of melanoma patients either fail to respond to ICB or eventually develop resistance. This leads to the urgent need for exploring novel treatments. Phospholipase A2 group IID (PLA2G2D) is an inducible enzyme found in myeloid cells, especially in aging dendritic cells (DCs), that exert an immunosuppressive effect by producing anti- or...
Inflammasome targeting for periodontitis prevention is sex dependent
Monday, October 27, 2025
Inflammasome initiates inflammation via the maturation of interleukin-1 beta (IL-1β). Periodontitis is a prevalent, male-biased disease characterized by inflammation-driven bone loss, yet the mechanism(s) of this sex bias is unknown. This study explored whether enhanced inflammasome represents a causal mechanism for this bias. Analyses of three separate human studies (>6,200 samples) show that males have significantly higher IL-1β in the gingival crevicular fluid than females during health and...
Case Report: Novel <em>IL10RB</em> variant causing very early onset-inflammatory bowel disease
Wednesday, October 22, 2025
CONCLUSION: We report a novel, loss-of-function IL10RB variant causing VEO-IBD, thus expanding the genotypic spectrum of this condition. This case highlights the diagnostic and therapeutic challenges of IL-10R deficiency-related VEO-IBD. It also underscores the importance of early recognition of monogenic causes of IBD, use of interim immunomodulatory therapies, and the need for optimal timing and donor selection for HSCT.