Dr. Randi Rotjan, a BU Research Assistant Professor of biology, co-authored and published a research paper in Science Immunology. This paper, “Deep-sea microbes as tools to refine the rules of innate immune pattern recognition”, has received a lot of media attention and was covered by The Brink, The Scientists, Mirage News, and the AAAS.
This research is a five-year, collaborative study among the Rotjan Marine Ecology Lab at Boston University, the Kagan Lab at Harvard Medical School, Boston Children’s Hospital, the government of Kiribati. Together, researchers examined thousands of genes sequenced across 2,000 nautical miles of central Pacific Ocean waters. They found out that human immune cells cannot register the existence of completely foreign bacteria, which overrides the common belief that mammals can recognize all bacteria they interact with.
“This was surprising because global recognition is a widespread assumption, but now, local pattern recognition makes sense,” Professor Rotjan said to an AAAS reporter. “There is no selective pressure for mammals to detect bacteria that inhabit an ecosystem different from their own — such as the deep sea.”
Read the full paper here. Read the full interview of Professor Rotjan here.