Research
The human body functions through a complex interplay of human processes and “services” rendered to us by the 1,000 trillion microbial cells we carry.
Disruptions of our natural microbial flora are linked to infection, autoimmune diseases and cancer, yet we know very little about our microbial component. Thanks to recent technological advances such as metagenomics and next-generation sequencing, it is now possible, for the first time, to study the various microbiota of the human body at a previously unseen scale.
The International Human Microbiome Project was initiated to genomically characterize all human-associated micro-organisms—the “microbiome”. However, because metagenomic datasets are so complex, their analysis remained a major bottleneck. A new, exciting subfield in computational biology arose that will eventually allow classical, cellular-level systems biology to progress towards modeling entire communities (“ecosystems biology”) and untangling interspecies networks of competition, collaboration and communication at the molecular level.
We combine large-scale, next-generation sequencing with novel computational approaches to investigate the functioning and variability of the healthy human microbiome at the systems level and study its alteration in disease.
In this context, we recently discovered the existence of discrete gut flora types (enterotypes), that are independent of host properties such as nationality, sex or race and are studying the predictive power of microbial markers for various intestinal diseases. In addition, we focus on the development of computational methods for the analysis of (next-generation) sequence data and the investigation of community properties from metagenomics, metatranscriptomics and meta-metabolomics data, which are applied in a wide range of environments (ocean, soil, etc.).