Background

We live in a microbial world with enormous genetic diversity and yet humanity’s relationship with microbes has been primarily adversarial, shaped by a small number of pathogenic species. As part of a National Research Foundation Investigatorship grant to the lab ( we are developing high-throughput techniques to isolate and study microbial diversity from a range of environmental (e.g. soil, sewage) and human samples (e.g. stool, saliva). We will combine single-cell dispensing technologies, genome-resolved metagenomics, flow‑cytometry and raman spectroscopy to functionally interrogate strains, study microbial interactions and build in silico models of community assembly. Our goals are to identify microbes and their functions that contribute to colonization resistance in the gut and the environment against multi‑drug resistant bacteria . Nagarajan Lab

The laboratory of metagen...