Research

Interoception - the perception of bodily signals from our internal organs - plays critical roles in our daily life, from creating self-awareness to protecting us from danger. We know very little about how the peripheral nervous system interacts with the internal organs to generate sensations. Nausea is one such important yet poorly studied visceral sensation mediated by the autonomic nervous system. Nausea can be evoked by food poisoning, pregnancy, cancer chemotherapy, food allergy, radiation, and many other clinical conditions, but the mechanisms remain largely unknown. We will explore these exciting frontiers of sensory biology.

To study mechanisms, our work will span molecular biology, cell physiology, organ physiology, neural circuits, and all the way to behaviors. We combine mouse genetics tools with emetic animal models, and we use techniques including in vivo and ex vivo imaging, electrophysiology, natural products screening, and RNA sequencing.

Questions that excite us include: What are the neural types that mediate peripheral detection of nausea cues in the gut? What are the molecular basis (i.e. receptors) for detecting nausea cues? What are the mechanisms that underlie distinct nausea conditions, for example, pregnancy, food poisoning and food allergy?