Guillaume De Lartigue, Ph.D.

Dr. de Lartigue graduated with a BS (hons) in Medical Biochemistry from the University of London in 2002. He received a Wellcome Trust PhD studentship, and joined the lab Prof. Graham Dockray FRS at the University of Liverpool working on determining the mechanisms of vagal afferent gut-brain signaling in the regulation of food intake. He moved to the lab of Dr. Helen Raybould at UC Davis in 2009 where he demonstrated that gut-brain signaling is disrupted in response to chronic ingestion of calorie-rich diets, and that this disruption is sufficient for the development of obesity. In 2013, Dr. de Lartigue was awarded a NIH K99/R00 Pathways to Independence grant to develop novel techniques to better study gut-brain signaling and determine whether vagal afferent neurons could be targeted for the treatment of obesity. In 2015, Dr. de Lartigue was jointly appointed as an Assistant Fellow at the John B. Pierce Laboratory and Assistant Professor in Department of Cellular and Molecular Physiology at the Yale School of Medicine. Research in the de Lartigue lab focuses on defining the role of vagal afferent neurons in health and disease. He was recruited to the Department of Pharmacodynamics at the University of Florida in 2018 and was promoted with tenure to associate professor in 2022.

The overarching focus of my lab revolves around the neurobiology of feeding. We are specifically interested in an understudied set of peripheral neurons that make up the sensory arm of the vagus nerve. These neurons form a direct anatomical link between the gut and the brain and provide a rapid neural mechanism for conveying information about the gastrointestinal environment to the brain. Although electrical stimulation of the vagus nerve is proving effective in treating a number of diseases, a lack of tools available to study the role of specific subsets of vagal neurons in physiological and disease states has led to an incomplete understanding of this pathway. We make use of molecular and genetic tools to target, image, and trace projections from subpopulations of sensory vagal neurons that innervate the gut to study the signals that active them and the circuits they recruit. In combination with behavioral, physiologic, and neurochemical techniques we study the role of vagal sensory neurons in the control feeding behaviors.

Ongoing projects in the lab include to 1) define the role of reversible, food‐dependent, switching in the neurochemical phenotype of sensory vagal neurons, 2) identify mechanisms that cause disruption in gut-brain signaling during diet-induced obesity, and 3) uncover neural circuits that are recruited by vagal sensory neurons in response to metabolic signals from the gut.