 |
 |
|
Yongqun "Oliver" He, D.V.M., Ph.D.
Research:Dr. He's laboratory research has two major thrusts: (1) Dry-lab bioinformatics research; and (2) Wet-lab Brucella microbiology and immunology research. Our primary research theme is to study scientific questions using integrated systems biology approaches. Dr. He's primary bioinformatics research focuses on the development of ontologies, ontology tools, databases, and analysis systems to address various biomedical questions. Dr. He has initiated and led the developed of many ontologies, including the community-based Vaccine Ontology (VO) and Ontology of Adverse Events (OAE). These ontologies are being used in different areas, for example, in ontology-based genome-wide literature mining. He group has also developed many ontology-oriented tools (such as OntoFox and Ontobee) to support ontology development and applications. He group is also interested in high throughput gene expression data analysis, especially using Bayesian network (BN) approaches. Our BN analysis methods can be used to identify novel gene interactions and networks for advanced study of different biological networks and pathways. We are also interested in comparative genomics, esp. microbial comparative genomics. We have focused our bioinformatics research efforts on the study of host-pathogen interactions (HPI) and vaccines against infectious diseases. For the vaccine informatics, we developed VIOLIN, a web-based vaccine database and analysis system. A key program of VIOLIN is Vaxign, the first web-based publically available vaccine target design tool based on bioinformatics analysis of genome sequences using the strategy of reverse vaccinology. For the host-pathogen interaction (HPI) data analysis, we developed PHIDIAS, a web-based comprehensive HPI database and analysis system. In our bioinformatics projects, we often use Brucella as our case study. Brucella spp. are Gram-negative, facultative intracellular bacteria that cause chronic brucellosis in various animals and humans. Human brucellosis remains one of the commonest zoonotic diseases worldwide with more than 500,000 new cases annually. Treatment of brucellosis is very difficult. Presently there is still no safe and effective Brucella vaccine available for human use. Dr. He's wet-lab Brucella research focuses on understanding of Brucella pathogenesis and vaccine-induced protective immunity in host against virulent Brucella. He laboratory is also developing effective and safe Brucella vaccines with an aim for eventual human use. Systems biology and bioinformatics approaches are also being applied to study Brucella pathogenesis and predict Brucella vaccine candidates. One major finding from our wet-lab Brucella research is that we for the first time identified a novel caspase-2-mediated proinflammatory cell death (see our references He et al, 2006, Chen and He, 2009, Chen et al, 2011, and Li and He, 2012). This cell death is induced by many rough attenuated Brucella strains, including Brucella cattle vaccine strain RB51, B. abortus wboA mutant VTRA1, and B. suis wboA mutant VTRS1.This cell death is prevented by wild type virulent Brucella in infected macrophages, but not in dendritic cells. The caspase-2 mediated cell death differs from apoptosis because apoptosis is not proinflammatory. It also differs from classic caspase-1-mediated pyroptosis because caspase-1 does not play a role in the cell death induction. We coined such a cell death as "caspase-2-mediated pyroptosis". Caspase-2 is critical in regulating cell death, DNA damage, stress, cancer, and microbial infections. We are dissecting the detailed caspase-2-mediated pyroptosis pathway and its biological effect on microbial pathogenesis, and protective immunity against brucellosis and many other diseases. More specific research projects are described Here. Teaching (selected):
Services (selected):
He Group Members:
Publications:
|
| He Lab |BBP|CRCView|GenoMesh|MARIMBA|miniTUBA|PHIDIAS|Vaccine Ontology|VIOLIN |
| He Group University of Michigan Medical School Ann Arbor, MI 48109 |
 |
 NIAID |