Our Technologies & Approaches
The gut microbiota is a new frontier for human health.
Sequencing-based efforts have revealed how the composition of this community is shaped by factors such as genetics, lifestyle, and diet, and how the microbiota in turn feeds back into host physiology.
However, these measurements yield a low-resolution view of the crucial interactions among microbes, host cells, and the local environment.
By employing sequencing alone, we end up ignoring cross-feeding, physical interactions, and stress cross-protection between bacterial species. Plus, by focusing on enumerating species, we overlook the dynamic physiological state of each species.
GutWorks will address these critical challenges through highly innovative technologies and approaches, including:
Cultivation of a phylogenetically diverse collection of gut commensal bacteria, with one set isolated from a broad set of humans and another isolated from a single individual
Microfluidics-enabled optimization of transformation efficiency
Barcoded transposon library generation using a “magic pools” approach to identify optimized transposome parts
A novel anaerobic sorting protocol to construct archived libraries of individual transposon mutants
Sequencing-based measurements of gene-phenotype relationships on a massive scale
In vivo (mouse) fitness measurements using gnotobiotic mice colonized with single or combinations of gut commensal species as transposon libraries.