Welcome to hegroup.org!

Welcome to the home page of Dr. Yongqun "Oliver" He's laboratory research group at the University of Michigan! We do both wet-lab (microbiology and immunology lab) and dry-lab (bioinformatics lab) biomedical research. Our primary biomedical research interest is to understand pathogenesis and immunology of infectious diseases and develop vaccines against intracellular pathogens. In particular, we study Brucella, a facultative intracellular bacterium that causes brucellosis, the most common zoonotic disease in the world in humans and a variety of animal species.

Our wet-lab Brucella research is focused on studying Brucella-induced programmed cell death and developing Brucella subunit vaccines. Virulent Brucella survives inside macrophages and prevents macrophage cell death, while attenuated rough Brucella strains (including Brucella cattle vaccine RB51) cannot survive inside macrophages and induce programmed macrophage cell death. Our research aims to elucidate the mechanism of the inhibited or induced macrophage cell death due to the macrophage-Brucella interactions and its effect on protective immunity against brucellosis. We are also interested in applying reverse vaccinology and more effective adjuvant strategies for Brucella subunit vaccine research and development (R & D).

Our primary bioinformatics research is to develop database and analysis systems to study pathogen-host interactions (PHI, or commonly called host-pathogen interactions or HPI) and vaccines against infectious diseases. We are interested in analyzing biological networks (e.g., apoptosis) by Bayesian network modeling, microarray data analysis, and literature mining. Dr. He is leading the development of the community-based Vaccine Ontology (VO). This ontology can be used in many applications, such as vaccine data integration and literature mining. These bioinformatics approaches are being explored to study Brucella and other infectious pathogens important for public health. 

Your suggestions and comments are welcome. Thank you.