Chemical signaling along the gut-brain-immune axis is important for regulating your health yet remains challenging to investigate with existing analytical technologies. Signaling along this axis occurs across multiple temporal and spatial scales and occurs across multiple biological systems presenting a unique challenge in method development. The Ross lab has worked over the last several years to develop innovative approaches to sensing neurochemicals important along this pathway, new organ- and multi-organ culture systems to better recapitulate the complex microenvironment of these systems ex vivo, and have synthesized new carbon-based materials to advance electrode-analyte interfaces for improved detection. Much of our work has focused on integrating fast-scan cyclic voltametric detection of neurochemicals in tissues not previously explored with this technique including slices from gut lymph nodes, spleen, and intestine and has worked to integrate these electrochemical approaches on-chip for multiplexed analysis of gut-brain-immune signaling. This talk will highlight our latest work in this area and discuss our current “hot takes” regarding method developing for gut-brain studies.
