The Students

The Big Picture

Using software I developed for estimating metabolic capacity from genomes and metagenomes, I am investigating determinants of microbial ecology in the inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) gut microbiome.

The intestinal microbiome is an integral part of mammalian health - gut bacteria provide many beneficial functions to their hosts and have been associated with numerous health and disease states. During inflammatory bowel disease (IBD), the gut microbiome loses a lot of its diversity. Why do some microbes die and others survive during gut stress? The answer may lie in their functional capacity. I developed software for estimating metabolic capacity from sequencing data, and am leveraging publicly-available gut metagenomes to investigate the functional differences between the healthy gut microbiome and the IBD gut microbiome.