Caltech Together: Silicon Valley
“The Secret Life Within the Small Intestine” By KC Huang Stanford Professor of Bioengineering, Microbiology, and Immunology
The human gut is home to trillions of microbes that influence our nutrition, immune system, and health. Yet much of what we know about these microbial communities comes from an unusual source: stool. Stool provides a convenient window into the colon, but tells us far less about the small intestine, where most nutrients are absorbed, many drugs enter our body, and microbes interact closely with both our diet and our bodies.
Better understanding of our small intestine would help us understand why people respond differently to foods and medications, leading to more personalized approaches to nutrition, drug treatment, and healthier guts. But the small intestine is a hidden world.
Our lab is developing new ways to explore this relatively inaccessible microbial ecosystem. Using ingestible sampling devices, laboratory-grown microbial communities, and animal models, we are beginning to uncover how the microbiome changes along the length of the intestine and how these spatial differences affect microbial function. These studies reveal that the small intestine contains microbial communities and activities that can be strikingly different from those inferred from stool.
We are also interested in how these communities change over time, not only through shifts in which species are present, such as via diet, antibiotics, and illness, but through evolution of the microbes themselves. Bacteria can exchange DNA through horizontal gene transfer, allowing traits to move between organisms rather than simply being inherited from parent to offspring. By tracking these genetic exchanges in complex communities, we are investigating how diet, antibiotics, viruses that infect bacteria, and interactions among species determine when and where genes move through the microbiome. Together, these approaches are revealing the gut microbiome as a dynamic, spatially organized ecosystem in which ecology and evolution occur on timescales relevant to our everyday lives.
Ultimately, we aim for our microbiome research to support personalized nutrition and medical treatment.
Meet Our Speaker
Kerwyn Casey (KC) Huang (BS ’98) is the LeRa II Professor of Bioengineering and of Microbiology and Immunology at Stanford University.
He began his scientific career as a theoretical physicist, earning undergraduate degrees in Physics and Mathematics from Caltech, followed by an MPhil in Physics from Cambridge as a Churchill Scholar, and a PhD in Physics from MIT.
During graduate school, a chance encounter with the remarkable spatial organization of bacteria drew him from theoretical physics into biology, and he has spent much of his career applying quantitative and physical approaches to understanding living systems.
KC’s laboratory studies how microbes grow, evolve, and interact with one another, from the physical principles governing individual bacterial cells to the ecology of the human gut microbiome. Recent work from his group has focused on exploring the largely inaccessible microbiome of the human small intestine and understanding how diet, antibiotics, and horizontal gene transfer reshape microbial communities.
KC’s honors include the NIH Director’s New Innovator Award and Pioneer Award, election as a Fellow of the American Physical Society, and a Fulbright U.S. Scholar Award. He is also an Investigator at the Chan Zuckerberg Biohub.
About the Event
$32 per person
Registration is capped at 60 people.
The catered dinner will include an assortment of sandwiches and salads. Drinks provided by Intuitive Surgical.
Our Alumni Volunteers
The following alumni work together to serve you: Avni Gandhi, Dave Adler, Eilleen Zhang, Jane Frommer, Kenny Jiang, Ralph Pursifull, Reeya Chenanda, Sara Ahmed, Susan Huynh, and Peter Tong.