Fellowship for Grant Jones: American Association of Immunologists

The broad goal of the D’Orazio lab is to understand how orally acquired pathogens evade host defense mechanisms in the gut to cause systemic disease. We primarily study the facultative intracellular bacterium Listeria monocytogenes (Lm) using a foodborne mouse model. The proposal outlined below describes the studies that senior graduate student Grant Jones has planned for his final year in graduate school. The focus of his dissertation project is to define how Lm disseminate from the intestinal lamina propria to the draining mesenteric lymph nodes, a critical bottleneck for systemic spread beyond the gastrointestinal tract (3-5) .