HOW DOES HEAT STRESS AFFECT IMMUNE SYSTEMS?

Lanre Morenikeji

Located in a small city near the Allegheny National Forest a few miles from the New York border, the University of Pittsburgh at Bradford, with an enrollment of 1,300 students, boasts rankings in value, alumni placement and earnings—as well as social mobility—that would be the envy of many larger institutions. Perhaps surprising to some for a small school deep in the Pennsylvania woods, Pitt-Bradford has the highest percentage of Black students in the Pitt system. The University has been recognized in several college rankings for equity and inclusion. 

Pitt-Bradford emphasizes faculty-student research collaborations that lead to publishable results. Immunologist Lanre Morenikeji and students conduct research that could not be more of the moment—the effects of heat stress on the immune systems of plants and animals. Morenikeji, assistant professor of biology, received a 2022 Pitt Momentum Fund Award for research on the effect of small molecules such as non-coding RNA on immune responses.

Morenikeji began by studying animal health in his native Nigeria. That work led to research in the United States on immunity in both experimental and computational genomics. His background studying human and animal vectors in malaria and SARS viruses put him in a unique position with the outbreak of COVID-19, caused by a SARS virus conventionally thought to be zoonotic—having passed from animals to humans.

“COVID-19 was a unique opportunity,” says Morenikeji. “I had students who were curious to know the relationship between the virus that infects humans and animals.” 

They looked at pathways that are common in the SARS CoV-2 infections and thought there might be a cross infection between animals that created a kind of a recombinant virus—a chimeric virus, containing genetic material from more than one virus. They did computational analysis and their results were published.

Morenikeji’s lab is now working on the effect of heat stress on immune responses in plants. Students in his lab grow maize plants and subject them to heat stress, measuring the respiration and growth rates along with changes in the plants’ physical parameters. The team extracts RNA at stages and compares the gene expression under varying conditions.

“Heat stress is not related to climate change alone, but climate change could be a major driver of increasing stress,” says Morenikeji. He cites heat stroke as one possible condition in humans that can be related to an increasingly hot environment.

“Climate change is affecting all life—human, plant and animal,” Morenikeji emphasizes. “The ultimate goal is to create a pathway to mitigate the stress response in the future, no matter what form of life.”