Carver College of Medicine Events
Molecular Medicine Interdisciplinary Program Thesis Defense Seminar: Alexa Sheehan
Monday, November 2, 2026 10:00am
Alexa Sheehan is a PhD candidate in the Biomedical Science (Molecular Medicine) Interdisciplinary Graduate Program. Her research has been conducted in Rebecca Dodd's laboratory.
If you are not able to attend in person, please consider showing your support by attending via Zoom. Please email britt-hokanson@uiowa.edu for the Zoom link.
2026 Neuroscience Research Day Keynote Speaker: Constanza J. Cortes, PhD
Monday, November 2, 2026 1:00pm
Keynote Speaker Announcement: Constanza J. Cortes, PhD
2026 Neuroscience Research Day – Monday, Nov. 2, 2026
We are excited to welcome Constanza J. Cortes, PhD, Assistant Professor of Gerontology at the USC Leonard Davis School of Gerontology, University of Southern California, to the University of Iowa for this year's Neuroscience Research Day.
Dr. Cortes's research explores the intersection of exercise, brain aging, skeletal muscle, and Alzheimer’s disease, with a particular focus on how...
Molecular Physiology and Biophysics Workshop, Rainbo Hultman, PhD
Tuesday, November 3, 2026 9:30am to 10:30am
REDCap Basic Training
Tuesday, November 3, 2026 10:00am to 11:30am
This is the first step in the REDCap training series. In this training, we will build a new REDCap project from scratch and cover basic features such as:
• Building forms with proper field types and validation
• Assigning user permissions
• Project backup and overview with data dictionary, codebook, pdf, and xml
• Ensuring your project works properly by testing with real world application
• Making mid-study modifications safely after having started data collection in production
• Creating and...
Recent Articles from the University of Iowa
Engineering a Hyper-Adherent <em>E. coli</em> Nissle Probiotic Strain That Reduces Intestinal Carriage of <em>Salmonella</em> Pathogens in Poultry
Tuesday, October 27, 2026
Poultry meat and eggs are major sources of Salmonella foodborne illness, due to carriage of these bacterial pathogens in the intestinal microbiome of chickens, which is an ongoing food safety issue throughout the world. Reducing or eliminating the carriage of Salmonella in poultry would significantly improve food safety and reduce cases of human salmonellosis. This study represents a new approach to reduce or eliminate carriage of Salmonella in poultry flocks. We have created an E. coli Nissle...
Spatial Transcriptomic Profiling of the Human Placenta in Congenital Cytomegalovirus Infection: A Broad Antiviral Response with Concurrent Suppression of Trophoblast and Vascular Programs
Tuesday, October 27, 2026
Congenital cytomegalovirus (CMV) is the most common congenital infection and a leading infectious cause of childhood hearing loss and neurodevelopmental disability. The cellular organization of the placental response to infection is incompletely defined. We applied Visium CytAssist spatial transcriptomics to formalin-fixed tissue from two CMV-infected and two uninfected late-gestation placentas and annotated the major maternal and fetal cell populations by reference-based label transfer. Across...
Global, regional, and national burden of unintentional poisoning, 1990-2023: results from the Global Burden of Disease Study 2023
Tuesday, October 27, 2026
BACKGROUND: Unintentional poisoning is a preventable cause of injury-related morbidity and mortality, yet global patterns, trends, and inequalities remain incompletely characterised. Within the Global Burden of Disease (GBD) framework, unintentional poisoning includes poisoning by carbon monoxide and poisoning by other means, a category largely informed by pesticide poisoning codes plus some indirect capture of other poisoning as part of the GBD re-distribution process. Poisonings by...
Dietary fiber selectively regulates intestinal persistence of probiotic bifidobacteria
Saturday, October 24, 2026
Bifidobacteria dominate the gut microbiota of breast-fed infants, and are strongly associated with human health, including immune regulation, colonization resistance, and protection against inflammation. However, bifidobacteria persist at high abundance after weaning in only a subset of individuals, and the factors that regulate intestinal persistence of bifidobacteria are poorly understood. Using gnotobiotic mouse models, we identified a common dietary fiber, raffinose, as a critical...
Conserved nucleocapsid epitopes induce cross-reactive CD4(+) T-cell responses with selective protection against human coronaviruses in mice
Thursday, October 22, 2026
No abstract
The Role of Neutrophil Extracellular Traps (NETosis) in Systemic Lupus Erythematosus: Molecular Mechanisms, Pathogenic Roles, Diagnostic Biomarkers, and Emerging Therapeutic Strategies
Friday, October 16, 2026
Neutrophil extracellular traps (NETs) are web-like structures comprising chromatin scaffolds decorated with cytotoxic granule proteins released during a specialized form of neutrophil cell death termed NETosis. Although NETs function as a critical antimicrobial defense mechanism, their dysregulation contributes significantly to the pathogenesis of systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE). In SLE patients, both excessive NET formation by proinflammatory low-density granulocytes (LDGs) and impaired NET...
Efficient colonic colonization by <em>Campylobacter jejuni</em> requires the heme receptor ChuA
Thursday, October 15, 2026
Previous research demonstrated that Campylobacter jejuni encodes a heme utilization system that facilitates heme-dependent growth under iron-limiting conditions, and that transcription of this system is induced during human infection. Despite these observations, it remained unknown whether the heme transport system is required for colonization and disease in a susceptible host. To address this, we created individual non-polar deletion mutants of each component of the heme transport system and...
TNFα promotes brain-predominant EAE independent of IFNγ and IL-17A in HLA-DR3 transgenic mice
Thursday, October 15, 2026
Multiple sclerosis (MS) is thought to be mediated by human leukocyte antigen (HLA) class II-restricted autoreactive CD4 T cells producing interleukin (IL)-17A and/or interferon γ (IFNγ), but the necessity of these cytokines for disease pathogenesis is unclear. Utilizing HLA-DR3 (DRβ1*0301) transgenic mice lacking IFNγ or IL-17A in experimental autoimmune encephalomyelitis (EAE), a model of MS, we found that neither cytokine is essential for disease induction, although both have distinct roles....
Gene regulatory behaviors of mutant CRX proteins demonstrated with late-stage human retinal organoids
Thursday, October 15, 2026
Variants in the transcription factor CRX cause a spectrum of retinal degenerative disorders including Leber congenital amaurosis 7 (LCA7). LCA7-associated variants exert a dominant effect in developing photoreceptor cells, leading to cellular dysfunction and poor to absent visual acuity in patients. Here, we dissect the allelic heterogeneity of LCA7 using multimodal single-cell gene expression and chromatin accessibility analysis of retinal organoids. We generated mature (240 day) retinal...
Hemagglutinin and fusion proteins precede measles virus ribonucleoproteins and marshal cell-to-cell spread in airway epithelium
Wednesday, October 14, 2026
Measles virus (MeV) is the most contagious human respiratory pathogen. To understand how it spreads in the airways, we infected well-differentiated primary cultures of human airway epithelial cells (HAE). We discovered that the MeV attachment protein (hemagglutinin, H), the fusion (F) protein, and the assembly organizer protein (matrix, M) reach newly infected cells ahead of, and independently from, the replicative complex proteins. To characterize the mechanisms of MeV spread, we generated a...