Jenny Tung, Faculty Associate at DUPRI and an Assistant Professor in the Department of Evolutionary Anthropology, has been awarded a five-year R01 grant from the National Institute of General Medical Sciences totaling $2.8 million to study changes in gene regulation in response to psychosocial stress among rhesus macaques. As a model for the human experience of chronic stress, Tung says the macaques' gene responses may shed light on mechanisms underlying some of the well-documented health effects linked to stress in people.
In a preliminary project while at the University of Chicago, Tung and her colleagues showed significant differences in gene activity in the immune cells of female macaques depending on their rank within the social group—patterns so consistent that an individual's rank could be predicted with 80 percent accuracy based on her gene-expression profile alone. The new work, to be conducted with macaques at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center, will further examine genetic and epigenetic changes linked to rank-associated stresses as well as differences in how the animals' immune systems respond to challenge. Collaborators will include Zachary P. Johnson and Mark E. Wilson at Yerkes and Luis B. Barreiro at the University of Montreal. Tung, who earned her PhD in Biology at Duke in 2010, completed a postdoctoral fellowship in the laboratory of Yoav Gilad in Chicago and recently returned to Duke to form her own lab.