The Role of Rapid Bacterial Evolution in Human Health and Disease
The human body is home to an astonishing number of microbes, commonly referred to as the ‘microbiome’, which collectively encodes ten times more genes than the human genome itself. Although the human microbiome has been implicated in a multitude of diseases, the full set of biological mechanisms underlying these connections remain unexplored. This project will conduct a large-scale analysis of ‘plasmids’, small pieces of DNA that can be exchanged between different bacterial cells but are not part of the bacterial chromosome by employing the power of most recent high-throughput sequencing strategies and machine learning approaches to investigate relationships among plasmid genetics, microbial community structures, and human health.
Principal Investigators: Michael Yu (Research Assistant Professor, Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago), A. Murat Eren (Assistant Professor, Department of Medicine)