Dr. Jones-Hall uses a mouse model to study how factors in the gut can influence inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) and the risks of IBD progressing into colon cancer.

Dr. Jones-Hall earned her undergraduate and veterinary degrees from historically black colleges/universities in Alabama: Talladega College (B.A.) and Tuskegee University (D.V.M.). After deployment to Afghanistan with the U.S. Army Veterinary Corps, she completed advanced veterinary training at Michigan State University in 2008. She was honorably discharged from the Army in 2009, having attained the rank of Captain. She went on to finish her Ph.D. from Michigan State and joined the faculty at Purdue shortly thereafter.

Increasingly, it is becoming clear that the bacteria that live on and within us have an impact on our health. In particular, there is interest in understanding the gut microbiome — the bacteria that live in our digestive tract. The composition of the gut microbiome (both which species are present and how abundant each one is) has been linked to disease states like inflammatory bowel disease (IBD). It has also been implicated in healthy digestion and metabolism, and even with psychological disorders. Mice provide a good model for studying the relationship between gut bacteria and health, but so far, conclusions have varied dramatically between different studies.

In a recent paper, Dr. Jones-Hall and colleagues argue that the reason for these inconclusive results is that no one is considering the variation in mouse microbiome closely enough. Although diet and housing are known to impact mouse gut microbiome, nobody has looked at sex or age as variables. Dr. Jones-Hall and others compared mice of two different ages, keeping track of males vs. females. They also compared normal mice to mice that lack an important inflammatory protein (TNF). They measured which bacteria were present in each mouse, then induced colitis and measured what changed in response.

The authors found that male mice had more severe disease symptoms than females, older mice had more severe symptoms than younger mice, and mice without TNF had less severe symptoms. When they compared the microbiome profiles, they found that these differences in disease corresponded really well to differences between the gut bacteria — and that these differences existed before the mice got sick. Thus, they argue that sex, age, and TNF all influence which bacteria are able to live in the gut of an individual mouse, and that this can explain whether or not a specific mouse gets colitis and how severe the symptoms are.