Dr. Elaine Petrof
M.D., M.Sc
Dept. of Medicine, Infectious Diseases
Tel: 613 549-6666 ext. 6516
elaine.petrof@queensu.ca
My research interests focus on probiotics, microbial-epithelial cell interactions in the gut, and the effects of intestinal bacteria on inflammation.
My lab is interested in the study of commensal bacteria, probiotics and the products they synthesize to inhibit inflammation and various forms of colitis, in understanding their mechanisms of action. It is hoped that these investigations will ultimately result in a better understanding of the protective role of commensal gut flora under conditions of inflammation and stress, and lead to novel probiotic-based treatment modalities for the management of inflammatory intestinal diseases.
Ongoing projects in the laboratory revolve around this long-term goal. The preliminary groundwork demonstrating that probiotics and their bioactive factors inhibit the NF-kB inflammatory pathway through proteasome inhibition in vitro has already been established, and now investigations are moving into in vivo models. There are now several disease states of intestinal inflammation in which my lab has an interest, for example inflammatory bowel disease (IBD), a form of inflammatory colitis whose etiology is poorly understood, and infectious colitis such as Salmonella colitis (i.e. food poisoning). Different models which represent these different disease states are used in my laboratory to further investigate the protective effects of commensal bacteria and probiotics under these different conditions, to better understand their mechanisms of action. Other areas of interest in my lab include necrotizing enterocolitis, an inflammatory colitis of prematurity, and characterization of the gut microbiota under different conditions and disease states using PCR-based technology and 16S rDNA typing.
