The trillions of microorganisms living in our gut (as well as the 70 gigatons carbon of microbes on the planet) perform a complex ballet of metabolic interactions between each other and their environment, giving rise to a myriad of biotransformations.

We study the flexibility of microorganisms in adapting their nutrient needs and their interactions with surrounding microbes in varying environments with a focus on how this may impact health and disease in the human gut.

Questions we are interested in are:

• Can we use genomic information to mechanistically predict metabolite uptake and production in a specific microbiome and environmental context?
• What is the impact of the environments on the microbial niche space and how does the microbiome interact and change the host-derived environment?
• Can niche dynamics predict engraftment and priority effects during the colonization by pathogens or probiotics?

We address these questions using computational and wetlab approaches including metagenomics, metabolomics, modeling, and single-cell culturomics.