Associate Professor at UIUC | HK | Microbial Systems Initiative | Integrative Microbiota Physiology Lab
Champaign, IL
Joined April 2020
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🚨Interested 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/ar…
Jacob Allen retweeted
Can We Reprogram Your Gut Bacteria? youtube.com/shorts/CrPPt5tBr… via @YouTube
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!
Jacob Allen retweeted
A new study by @IlliniHealthKin researchers has identified a pathway by which social stress can worsen symptoms of inflammatory bowel disease—a commonly reported phenomenon for those with IBD.
Read the full story ➡️ go.ahs.illinois.edu/StressCo…
Breaking the X hiatus for a New Paper Alert 🚨
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/4141…
Jacob Allen retweeted
📜Our paper officially published w/ @JacobAllenPhD and team!👇👇
Social stress worsens colitis through β-adrenergic–driven oxidative stress in intestinal mucosal compartments: β-adrenergic and ROS pathways as therapeutic targets for stress-exacerbated IBD.
sciencedirect.com/science/ar…
Fun day with the lab celebrating @MikaelaK_RD PhD and arrival of new student Eleanor Eck! See Mikaela’s new lab coat with some fermented food “bling”… I focused on design, but I forgot about the size (an XXL… Mikaela is 5 ft 2… 😬). Correct size is inbound :)
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/10.1128…
Jacob Allen retweeted
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/scie…
Jacob Allen retweeted
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
👉 nature.com/articles/s41551-0…
👉 innovativegenomics.org/news/…
Jacob Allen retweeted
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 don’t) about fermented foods & why clearer definitions & research matter.
🔗 pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/article…
🚨 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
🔗 biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/…
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 :)
Huge congrats to the newly minted PhD @MikaelaK_RD! Mikaela helped pioneer our lab’s 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! 🥳🎓🍽️
What an awesome #GutBrainAxis symposium at #PNIRS2025! Huge honor to co-chair with @Eli_melb and share the stage with Frank Duca and Allen Lab’s own Elisa Caetano-Silva. Incredible science and even better people. Thanks to everyone who joined us!
Jacob Allen retweeted
What are the ground truths on diet’s 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
