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Apekshya Chhetri, B.Sc/M.Sc. (she/her/hers)

Graduate Student
Purdue University
West Lafayette, Indiana, United States

I am a PhD student mentored by Dr. Patricia Wolf at Purdue University's Department of Nutrition Sciences. We are interested in the cross-talk of lifestyle factors affecting colorectal cancer (CRC). In particular, I am investigating the impact of socioenvironmental factors, diet, and sulfur-reducing bacteria on colorectal cancer initiation and progression. We are focused on thiol group-rich amino acid cysteine utilizing bacterial genomes, their enzymes, and resulting metabolites associated with diet. In earlier studies, our group has established sulfur-utilizing bacterial genomes to be positively associated with CRC, particularly in Black and young (<50 years) CRC individuals from the Chicago metropolitan area. Using the National Center for Biotechnology (NCBI) databases, I compared amino acid sequences of a cysteine utilizing enzyme tryptophanase across our diet quality-associated gut microbial genus (obtained from 16srRNA metagenomic dataset stratified to two different diet qualities based on Healthy Eating Index-2015). These results offer interesting insights into microbial genomes associated with diet quality, which can be expanded for in-depth diet utilization patterns in CRC risk-population.

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