Follow you Gut: Film to Mining Microbes

Sonny Lee, assistant professor of biology, was initially making films and wanted to film pretty fish swimming in the ocean. Yes, FILM! That may sound a little out of the ordinary for a biology professor. He decided to go back to college and get a science degree and eventually his Ph. D. in microbiology. Now at K-State, Lee studies a host-microbe interactions using a combination of genomics-enabled technologies and wet-lab techniques. These technologies allow Lee to inventory microbial genes, functions, and expressions.

Lee and his lab focus on the gut to understand how excessive inflammation may result in tumors or even cancer. Dr. Lee says that he never thought about working in microbiology, but when he realized it was hard science it piqued his interest. “I started to get interested in consequential things, smaller organisms, so from the pretty fish and I started to get interested in bacteria.”

How did Lee go from colorful fish to cancer research? “It was really by chance at the end of my Ph.D., I decided that I want to understand not just the bacterial communities but what they are doing, and I started finding that the technology offered was not efficient.” During his post-doc, he was studying the human gut, and was interested in microbial communities and their functional relationship with the human host.

“I am interested in the human gut, inflammation and how it gets out of control and can cause tumors or even cancer. We look at bacteria, fungi, viruses, and we use all sorts of model systems from mouse to human samples. We look at not just what these microbes are doing, but how we can intervene/interfere to prevent the inflammation from getting worse or persistently inflamed all the time. One of the things about studying microbes is trying to gain a deeper understanding of our relationship with our microbes.”

The Lee lab has many significant findings. They use a mouse model to determine which microbe could be the cause of the persistent inflammation involved in cancer formation. “We give the mom mice antibiotics which causes a gut microbe imbalance because the antibiotics kill some but not all microbes. The thing that is interesting is this unbalance is in not just in the mom but get passed on to the next generation.”

Lee and his lab hypothesize that some of these microbes may remove specific nutrients from the hosts’ intestines that prevents the mom and the pups from decreasing the gut inflammation. There are some molecules in the gut that are also an energy source for the microbes. So, what they believe may be happening is that these microbes are taking away these chemical products from the pups, resulting in the pups not having the molecules to repair their own gut inflammation.

The Johnson Cancer Research Center has helped Lee’s research tremendously, not only with providing awards, but being available to exchange information and ideas. “Sometimes we do not understand everything because we only do an exceedingly small part of it, and we understand what we are good at. But biology does not work that way. So, a lot of times I will go to the Director of the JCRC, Dr. Sherry Fleming, or other cancer center members to get their help in understanding what I am seeing and why. Sometimes they have insights, sometimes they don’t, but I always come away with a good visit and go investigate some of the ideas.”