What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger?

Probably the single-most important medical advance is the development of antimicrobial drugs, relegating many infectious diseases to an inconvenient doctors visit. Importantly, these drugs allow us to carry out other modern medical procedures that are otherwise too risky. However, over- and mis-use of these drugs is leading to the nightmare scenario: growing numbers of microbes have developed resistance to these drugs, rendering them useless. The search for how resistances spread and develop is critical in the fight to maintain and expand modern medicine.

The human microbiome is a complex and diverse microbial community associated with human health and diseases. The microbiome is linked with illnesses such as obesity, diabetes and colon cancer and the diversity of the microbiota is influenced by diet, environment and age. We aim to use this information to determine the underlying mechanisms in health and disease by identifying key interactions in the human microbiome. These outcomes can help to explore novel therapeutics, bacterial cocktails and personalized diet modification for better treatment of associated diseases.