James A. Coffman, Ph.D. (IMAGE)
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The MDI Biological Laboratory has announced that James A. Coffman, Ph.D., has received a two-year grant totaling $166,000 from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) for his research on the regulation of cortisol, a naturally occurring steroid that governs how the body responds to stress.
Coffman, a developmental biologist and an associate professor at the laboratory, studies why organisms exposed to chronic early-life stress are more vulnerable later in life -- long after a source of stress has been removed -- to inflammatory diseases like arthritis, asthma, cancer, diabetes, heart disease and even mental illness.
He uses the common aquarium fish, the zebrafish, as a model to study the gene regulatory circuitry by which chronic exposure to elevated cortisol affects the development of the neuroendocrine stress response system. The award will fund research on a specific gene, Klf9, that the Coffman laboratory has shown to be activated by such exposure.
The award was made by the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development.
Coffman will use the funds to assess Klf9's role in regulating the stress response by comparing wild zebrafish to genetically modified zebrafish that lack Klf9 function. The aim of his research is to determine if Klf9 is critical to the regulatory circuity controlling stress signaling and to provide a foundation for future research to further elucidate the regulatory networks governing the stress response.
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MDI Biological Laboratory
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