Physiological systems have evolved to be robust. Nonetheless, exposure to severe or prolonged stress can induce permanent or semi-permanent changes in function. These long-term changes are generally maladaptive. We are interested in understanding how different physiological systems are affected by chronic stress.
It has proven surprisingly difficult to develop robust and quantitative measures of traumatic stress exposure. We have recently shown that the gene regulatory network encodes sufficient information to reliably distinguish control subjects from those exposed to traumatic stress (Jacobson et al 2018). This information can be used to construct a Stress Sensitive Gene Index that robustly measures stress exposure in a quantitative fashion.
Our current research is focused on improving gene regulatory network based measures of stress exposure and adapting them for use in humans. We use several high throughput sequencing technologies to study changes in the epigenome and the transcriptome in animal and human models of chronic stress.