Alice Kane
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alicekane.bsky.social
Alice Kane
@alicekane.bsky.social
Ling/Obrzut Assistant Professor at the Institute for Systems Biology (ISB) in Seattle. Originally from Australia, now in the US. Interested in frailty, aging, epigenetics and mouse models.
Reposted by Alice Kane
Great primer from #NobelPrize winner Dr. Mary Brunkow on @npr.org's Here & Now: how FOXP3 and T regs help keep the immune system from harming the body. (~6 min) @wbur.org
🎧 www.wbur.org/hereandnow/2...
Nobel Prize winner Mary Brunkow on immune system research
Mary Brunkow was awarded the 2025 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, along with Fred Ramsdell and Shimon Sakaguchi, for their "groundbreaking discoveries concerning peripheral immune tolerance tha...
www.wbur.org
October 15, 2025 at 8:39 PM
Reposted by Alice Kane
Why do current diagnostics struggle to detect Lyme disease? Our new preprint reveals highly localized immune responses: tissue and vascular responses dominate, while peripheral activation is minimal.
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
#LymeDisease #Multiomics #Immunology
A thread ⬇️
Multiomics Reveals Compartmentalized Immune Responses and Tissue-Vascular Signatures in Lyme Disease
Lyme disease (LD) is growing in incidence, with nearly 500,000 cases diagnosed annually in the United States. Despite treatment, some patients experience persistent symptoms. The immune mechanisms underlying LD remain poorly understood. We conducted a multiomic longitudinal analysis of 49 LD patients and matched controls, integrating plasma proteomics, metabolomics, PBMC immunophenotyping, and a meta-analysis of skin lesions. We identified compartmentalized immune responses in acute LD, with coordinated alterations in circulating plasma proteins and metabolites linked to endothelial barrier stability, metabolic reprogramming, and symptom severity, predominantly traced to tissue and vascular immune processes at the site of infection. In contrast, PBMCs remained largely quiescent, revealing a disconnect between localized tissue responses and systemic immunity. These findings provide novel insights into LD pathophysiology and highlight the potential for diagnostics leveraging tissue and vascular immune markers detectable in blood. They also provide a resource for biomarker discovery and predictive modeling to improve LD management. ### Competing Interest Statement CR, AB, HH, LP, MEB, DC, CL, ASA, BS, KS, PT, KW, NR, LH, and NS declare no competing financial interests. GPW reports receiving research grants from Biopeptides Corp., has served as an expert witness in malpractice cases involving Lyme disease, and is an unpaid board member of the non-profit American Lyme Disease Foundation. United States Department of Defense, https://ror.org/0447fe631, W81XWH2110664 Wilke Family Foundation Steven and Alexandra Cohen Foundation Global Lyme Alliance, https://ror.org/05tzrqq19
www.biorxiv.org
June 6, 2025 at 12:14 AM
Reposted by Alice Kane
Check out our new paper about metabolite biomarkers for frailty in mice. Age- and frailty-related metabolites are different and present sex dimorphisms www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Thanks to @alicekane.bsky.social @judywbio.bsky.social & other authors
Metabolomics biomarkers of frailty: a longitudinal study of aging female and male mice - npj Aging
npj Aging - Metabolomics biomarkers of frailty: a longitudinal study of aging female and male mice
www.nature.com
May 31, 2025 at 6:18 PM
Check out our latest preprint on the development of clocks to predict PhenoAge in mice! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
Multiomic clocks to predict phenotypic age in mice
Biological age refers to a person's overall health in aging, as distinct from their chronological age. Diverse measures of biological age, referred to as clocks, have been developed in recent years an...
www.biorxiv.org
May 6, 2025 at 4:34 PM
@susanehowlett.bsky.social Susan Howlett and I are co-editing a special issue of JGBS on Animal Models of Frailty 🐒🐶🐭🐀 - reach out if you would like to contribute! academic.oup.com/biomedgeront...
Call for Papers
Animal Models of Frailty Biological Sciences section of The Journals of Gerontology, Series A Guest Editor: Susan E. Howlett, PhD, Dalhousie University, Halif
academic.oup.com
May 6, 2025 at 4:32 PM
Great work from the lab of @bbparis1984.bsky.social !
May 3, 2025 at 1:14 AM
Reposted by Alice Kane
This Friday, 11:30-1 and in-person, @isbscience.org's @alicekane.bsky.social will present The Biology of Aging: Bridging Frailty and Health Outcomes, offering insights into how aging affects health & function. Register: www.eventbrite.com/e/2024-2025-...
April 8, 2025 at 5:57 PM
Reposted by Alice Kane
Wondering if your study section cancelled? I update this sheet daily. As of today, 56/124 study sections that should have met since Jan 2, 2025 have "not met as scheduled." docs.google.com/spreadsheets...
2025 Study section tracking
docs.google.com
February 24, 2025 at 4:17 PM
Data request! Do you assess frailty index in your aging C57 mouse studies? @dantong-zhu.bsky.social is making new and improved clocks to predict age and lifespan based on frailty data & we aim to validate widely! Reach out if you want to collaborate 🐀👵⏰ Especially if you have female data + lifespan!
February 28, 2025 at 8:01 PM
Reposted by Alice Kane
Introducing "Metagenomic Estimation of Dietary Intake", or "MEDI": a data-driven approach to estimating dietary and nutritional intake from stool DNA 💩 - 🍌🥦🐟🥩📈

See @cdiener.com's excellent thread below.

We are really proud of this work, and we hope it is useful to the scientific community.
February 18, 2025 at 1:48 PM
Reposted by Alice Kane
Happy to announce that MEDI, our method to quantify dietary intake through metagenomics is out now. 🧬 🧪🧫🦠 www.nature.com/articles/s42...

#metagenomics #microbiome #microbiomesky

So what is MEDI? A combination of two things:
Metagenomic estimation of dietary intake from human stool - Nature Metabolism
Diener et al. present a method that allows the estimation of dietary intake from human stool by detecting food-derived DNA in faecal metagenomes.
www.nature.com
February 18, 2025 at 11:02 AM
Reposted by Alice Kane
Interested in doing a PhD in Austria focused on understanding how to engineer the composition of the gut microbiota?

Want to work with a brilliant computational biologist and microbiome researcher?

See below!
February 17, 2025 at 3:21 PM
Reposted by Alice Kane
The Dog Aging Project is an innovative research initiative that brings together a community of dogs, owners, veterinarians, researchers, and volunteers to carry out the most ambitious canine health study in the world.
dogagingproject.org
February 17, 2025 at 5:17 PM
Reposted by Alice Kane
🌟 Join us in Anchorage, Alaska for the AGE 53rd Annual Meeting: New Frontiers in Aging Research! 🌟

This is an event you won’t want to miss!

📅 Save the Date & Be Part of the Conversation!
January 30, 2025 at 7:26 PM
Reposted by Alice Kane

Metabolomics biomarkers of frailty: a longitudinal study of aging female and male mice

"...In summary, our results identify sex-specific metabolite biomarkers of frailty in aging, and shed light on potential mechanisms involved in frailty"

@alicekane.bsky.social

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
Metabolomics biomarkers of frailty: a longitudinal study of aging female and male mice
Frailty is an age related geriatric syndrome, for which the mechanisms remain largely unknown. We performed a longitudinal study of aging female (n = 40) and male (n = 47) C57BL/6NIA mice, measured fr...
www.biorxiv.org
January 23, 2025 at 8:54 PM
Reposted by Alice Kane
Biological sex is a key modifier of #aging phenotypes, including #Brain 🧠 aging.
See this piece out today in #Neuron, spearheaded by @denadubal.bsky.social, co-authored by #YousinSuh, @ctmurphy1.bsky.social and myself on the topic:
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
#GeroSky #SexDifferences
January 8, 2025 at 4:54 PM
Check out the first publication from the Kane lab @isbscience.org! RNAseq analysis of sex differences in aging across tissues - spoiler alert - there are lots of them! bsd.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.... Congratulations and thans to @dantong-zhu.bsky.social, @judywbio.bsky.social & other authors.
Sex dimorphism and tissue specificity of gene expression changes in aging mice - Biology of Sex Differences
Background Aging is a complex process that involves all tissues in an organism and shows sex dimorphism. While transcriptional changes in aging have been well characterized, the majority of studies ha...
bsd.biomedcentral.com
January 2, 2025 at 8:23 PM
Looking to hire a postdoc who is excited about epigenetics and aging! ISB is an incredible place to work, and Seattle is great! Plus Washington postdoc salaries are 👌 Come join us! isbscience.hrmdirect.com/employment/j...
isbscience.hrmdirect.com
October 10, 2023 at 4:00 PM