Departmental Research Groups

Group leader: James Marsh

The community of microorganisms within the human gastrointestinal tract is one of the most diverse ecosystems known, yet we currently have limited tools to unravel its intrinsic complexity. Next-generation sequencing approaches have been invaluable for the characterisation of gut microbial distribution, abundance, and evolution, but elucidating the mechanistic basis for these dynamics requires an ability to perturb the system through manipulation and testing. [more]

Group leader: Alexander Tyakht

While the taxonomic structure of gut microbiome in the world human populations has been outlined, its subspecies-level genomic richness in the context of co-evolution with the host, particularly the variability of its extrachromosomal content, is still to be elucidated. Using the state-of-art bionformatic pipelines and algorithms, the diversity of mobile genetic elements (plasmids, phages) will be analyzed. [more]