Our Current Projects

1. Elucidating the consequences of dietary sugar consumption on the gut microbiota

Sugar-rich diets can promote disease by modifying gene expression and metabolism in the human gut microbiota. We are investigating how dietary sugar consumption silences the activity of a highly conserved bacterial transcription factor necessary for gut colonization. We have identified molecular determinants that control the activity of this transcription factor and propose to elucidate how host sugar consumption reduces its activity in vivo. Our study will reveal how modern industrialized diets influence the human gut microbiota and identify novel molecular targets to manipulate gut microbial composition and metabolism.

2. Harnessing the gut microbiome to detect and quantify glycans

We have harnessed the glycan detection machinery possessed by members of the human gut microbiome to develop a new toolkit to complement current glycomics approaches. We demonstrate how these tools can be implemented to surveille crude biological samples for structurally diverse plant, animal, and microbial glycans and subsequently measure the relative abundance of individual substrates present in heterogenous glycan mixtures. Finally, we propose expand the capacity, specificity, and sensitivity of these tools to develop new affinity purification methods that can rapidly isolate individual glycans from a mixture for downstream structural analysis.