Grants and Contributions:

Grant or Award spanning more than one fiscal year. (2017-2018 to 2022-2023)

The challenges faced by mammals in adapting to their environment must be tightly controlled in order to ensure the best physiological function. To achieve this, mammals have evolved to have various housekeeping systems (mostly mediated by hormones) that maintain a healthy body function. Many of these hormones travel in the bloodstream and this is how they reach to various parts of the body. To have an effect on the target cell or body part, a hormone must exit from the circulation of the mammal and enter that tissue. We believe that understanding how this happens is an understudied area of mammalian physiology. Here we will study how a hormone moves across the barrier of cells lining all blood vessels and in particular we focus on movement between adjacent cells.

Mammals must respond correctly to a wide spectrum of environmental cues and in this research we will focus on nutritional influences, in particular that of iron. This ia a trace element essential for life, a constituent of many dietary supplements, and yet also known to be toxic at high doses. We will examine how iron alters the ability of hormones to move from the bloodstream, across the blood vessel wall, and into the region where it can elicit biological effects.

In summary, we think this is a very important and underappreciated area of physiolgy. With a paucity of information in this field of study, our research will establish new knowledge for animal physiologists that may be of significance in understanding how many environmental factors can change the ability of hormones to work and maintain normal body function.