Dr. Chun-Jun Guo is a newly appointed faculty member to the Jill Roberts Institute for Research in Inflammatory Bowel Disease, Weill Department of Medicine at Weill Cornell Medicine. His lab is located on the 7th floor of Belfer Research Building and his research program focuses on studying the molecular mechanisms behind host-microbe interaction in the context of health and disease.
Before joining JRI-WCM, Dr. Guo was a postdoctoral scholar at Professor Michael Fischbach’s lab at Stanford working on the small molecules from the bacteria living in the human intestine, commonly known as ‘the human gut microbiota’. These molecules are highly abundant, circulatory, and few of them are well-known ligands for host receptors. However, the biology of the majority of them still remains elusive. Dr. Guo developed the first CRISPR-Cas9-based system in a gut commensal Clostridium sporogenes that is previously challenging to be genetically modified. By mutating the biosynthetic genes for a metabolite and using mouse models, Dr. Guo is able to toggle on/off the production of these abundant microbiome-derived small molecules in the host and use this tool to investigate their effects on host biology and IBD progression. To continue reading, click here...