Frontiers in Chemistry and Chemical Engineering
Pamela Chang completed her S.B. in Chemistry with a minor in Biology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and her Ph.D. in Chemistry at the University of California, Berkeley, where she developed chemical tools for imaging and profiling glycosylation in the laboratory of Carolyn Bertozzi. Pam received her postdoctoral training in the laboratory of Ruslan Medzhitov at the Yale University School of Medicine in the Department of Immunobiology, where she characterized the regulation of innate immunity by microbial metabolites, including short-chain fatty acids. Pam is currently an associate professor in the Departments of Microbiology and Immunology and Chemistry and Chemical Biology at Cornell. She is a recipient of the Sloan Research Fellowship, the Beckman Young Investigator Award, and was most recently named an ACS Infectious Diseases Young Investigator.
Despite the abundance and prevalence of the gut microbiota, little is known regarding the pathways and mechanisms by which these microbes affect host health. Emerging evidence suggests that many small-molecule metabolites that are produced by the gut microbiota have the ability to modulate host defense mechanisms in various inflammatory diseases. We describe amino acid-derived metabolites produced by the gut microbiota that provide colonization resistance against gastrointestinal infection with an enteric bacterial pathogen, Citrobacter rodentium (Nature 2024). In complementary work, we have also developed chemical approaches for probing the metabolic activities of biosynthetic enzymes expressed by the gut microbiota that are responsible for producing important classes of small-molecule metabolites whose metabolism is dysregulated in many inflammatory diseases (ACS Cent Sci 2019 and Manuscript in revision).
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