Gastrointestinal Microbiota: From metagenomic correlation to causative validation and bacteriotherapy design, 22 Feb

12-1pm, Wednesday 22 February, Seminar Room 1, TRF

Presented by Dr Samuel Forster, Research Fellow, Pathogens Group, Wellcome Trust Sanger Centre, Cambridge UK
NHMRC C.J. Martin Fellow, Centre for Innate Immunity and Infectious Disease, Hudson Institute of Medical Research

Sam's work combines microbiology, immunology and computational analysis to understand the functional role and community dynamics of the human microbiota in health and disease.
Understanding how our microbiota is acquired and the forces that cause it to change provides important insights into health and disease. Sam's research seeks to understand the relationship between host state, microbiota community and the susceptibility to diseases including infections by opportunistic pathogens such
as Clostridium difficile and Inflammatory Bowel Disease.

His research is focused on:
 Wide scale 16S profiling and metagenomic sequence based analysis to understand microbiota community structure
 Computational modeling and machine learning based approaches to understand microbiota community dynamics in health and dysbiotic disease
 Analysis of the diversity of host cellular and transcriptional responses using in-vitro and in-vivo models of human microbiota communities

This work ultimately seeks to provide novel bacteriotherapies and identify other therapeutic interventions to improve human health.

Bugs as drugs: harnessing novel gut bacteria for human health

Dr Samuel Forster

Researchers are optimistic that a recent breakthrough allowing growth of the majority of human gut bacteria in the lab will lead to the development of new therapies to replace the use of faecal transplants in treating certain gut infections.
Scientists at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, including Dr Samuel Forster, an NHMRC C.J. Martin Biomedical Overseas Fellow from Hudson Institute of Medical Research's Centre for Innate Immunity and Infectious Diseases in Melbourne, have grown and catalogued more than 130 bacteria from the human intestine according to a study published in Nature last week.

The researchers have developed a process to grow the majority of bacteria from the gut, which will enable scientists to understand how our bacterial ‘microbiome’ helps keep us healthy. Imbalances in our gut microbiome can contribute to complex conditions and diseases such as obesity, Inflammatory Bowel Disease, Irritable Bowel Syndrome and allergies. This research will allow scientists to start to create tailor-made treatments with specific beneficial bacteria.

Research in this field has expanded greatly in recent years with the intestinal microbiome being termed a ‘forgotten organ’, such is its importance to human health. Approximately 2 per cent of a person’s body weight is due to bacteria. Many of these bacteria are sensitive to oxygen and are difficult to culture in the laboratory, so until now it has been extremely difficult to isolate and study them. Read more here.