Psychobiological regulation and molecular characterization of cell-free mitochondrial DNA in humans
Description: PROJECT NARRATIVE The field of psychobiology lacks robust, biologically informative biomarkers to evaluate the emerging role of mitochondria in the stress-disease cascade. We have assembled an interdisciplinary team of psychosocial, clinical, and mitochondrial scientists to examine the psychobiological regulation of cell-free mitochondrial DNA (cf-mtDNA) and validate dynamic features of stress-evoked cf-mtDNA responses across thousands of samples from healthy women and men. The combined i) multi-study psychosocial challenge approach, including nested (quasi)experimental manipulations of mitochondrial energy metabolism, ii) novel discovery-based human stress proteome analyses, and iii) laboratory experiments to dissect the molecular nature of cf-mtDNA, will provide foundational knowledge to develop novel markers of mitochondrial biology, which can subsequently be deployed at scale in clinical and epidemiological studies aiming to understand the basis of human health, resilience, and vulnerability to disease.
Funding type: research
Funder scheme: R01
Start date: 2024-08-01
End date: 2029-04-30
Investigator: MARTIN PICARD
Institution: COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY HEALTH SCIENCES
Funded outputs count: 12
Funder award ID: R01MH137190
OpenAlex ID: G9000861773