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We explore microbial functions in the gut ecosystem.
Research Overview
Research Overview
We are a lab in the Department of Microbiology and Immunology at the University at Buffalo. Our research group is broadly interested in discovering new molecular pathways encoded among gut anaerobes important for bacterial growth, survival, and colonization. We also study how bacteria and phages (bacterial viruses) interact in the human gut. We focus on the most abundant and prevalent bacteria in the human gut, members of the taxonomic order Bacteroidales. To achieve our goals, the lab applies a broad range of interdisciplinary approaches across scale to characterize functions important for bacterial fitness in the gut, including high-throughput functional genomics, anaerobic microbiology, biochemistry, and bioinformatics.
 Research focuses in the lab:
1) Identify and characterize pathways important for metabolism and stress tolerance in gut anaerobes.
2) Study how anaerobic phages infect bacteria and how bacteria resist phage infections.
3) Develop methods to advance functional characterizations of gut microbes.
We apply DNA barcoding in both TnSeq and Boba-seq (Barcoded Overexpression BActerial) libraries, which drastically increases the throughput of fitness assays in a cost-effective manner. By uniquely tagging individual strains in diverse libraries, we can readily quantify strain abundances across hundreds of experiments to identify genes that altered bacterial fitness.
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