Prof. Dr. Katrine Whiteson (University of California, Irvine)

Biological Colloquium at the Biology Center of the Christian-Albrechts-University Kiel
Thursday, July 2^nd 2018, 16:15

 ZMB
Conference room 4^th floor
Am Botanischen Garten 11

As guest of the CRC 1182

Prof. Dr. Katrine Whiteson

University of California, Irvine

Talks about:

“What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger: Engineering human bacterial and phage communities in the 21st century”

Abstract:  Viruses that infect bacteria, bacteriophages, are important for human health both because of their role in the human microbiome and their potential for use in phage therapy.  Much of the unique composition of individual gut microbiomes may be imparted by the continuous arms races between bacteria and phage.  Several recent phage related projects will be presented from 1) viromes of the cystic fibrosis airways, 2) pre-mature infants from Children’s Hospital Orange County, and 3) experimental co-evolution to study the coevolutionary dynamics of understudied human gut bacteria and their phage. In a recent study of preterm infant gut microbial community composition, all of the babies were given antibiotics, and Enterococcus spp. were the most abundant bacteria (Wandro 2018). This motivated us to study the interaction of Enterococcus spp. and their phage in coevolution experiments, both in order to understand the diversity generating interactions between bacteria and their phage that are occurring in all of us, and to understand how these dynamics might play out if we wanted to use phage to engineer the microbiome. Tracking mutations from population sequencing of experimental coevolution can quickly illuminate phage entry points along with resistance strategies in both phage and host – critical information for using phage to manipulate microbial communities.