Building the gut microbiome

细菌对我们生活的许多方面产生了巨大影响，包括健康，农业，工业，水处理服务和气候。他们通常生活在人口密集的社区，在那里他们可以彼此密切互动。特别是，现在已知生活在我们消化道中的“细菌群落”对我们的健康和福祉至关重要，例如保护我们免受有害细菌的侵害，改善我们的营养和训练我们的免疫系统。至关重要的是，社区组成和结构的变化可能导致慢性和危及生命的疾病。因此，我们必须了解这些细菌是如何相互作用的，如果我们想进一步释放我们的健康益处。然而，研究和理解这些细菌群落是非常困难的，特别是在它们自然发生的微小尺度上。迫切需要新的方法来构建简化的细菌群落及其宿主，捕捉我们体内不同细菌的复杂排列和相互作用。我的目标是建立新的易处理的模型-使用3D打印和流动系统-研究社区和宿主的组成和结构如何决定细菌社区如何随着时间的推移而持续存在，重要的是，如果他们茁壮成长或死亡。我选择在这个研究领域工作，因为我相信我可以通过建立简化的微生物组模型来大大提高我们对宿主，社区结构和社区功能之间联系的理解。重要的是，我在整个提案中开发的技术和理解不仅有利于人类微生物组的研究，而且有利于整个环境中发现的微生物群落。

Bacteria hugely impact many aspects of our lives, including health, agriculture, industry, water treatment services, and the climate. Often, they live together in densely packed communities, where they can strongly interact with each other. In particular, the 'bacterial communities' living in our digestive tract are now known to be essential for our health and well-being, such as protecting us from harmful bacteria, improving our nutrition, and training our immune systems. Critically, changes in the community composition and structure can lead to chronic and life-threatening diseases. Therefore, we must understand how these bacteria interact with each other and ourselves if we want to unlock further health benefits available to us. However, it is extremely difficult to study and understand these bacterial communities, especially at the tiny scales at which they naturally occur. New methods are urgently needed to build simplified bacterial communities and their hosts, capturing the complex arrangements and interactions of different bacteria found within us. My goal is to build new tractable models - using 3D printing and flow systems - to study how the composition and structure of the community and the host determine how bacterial communities persist over time, and importantly, if they thrive or perish. I have chosen to work in this research area because I believe I can vastly improve our understanding of the link between the host, community structure, and community function by building simplified microbiome models. Importantly, the technologies and understanding I develop throughout this proposal will not only benefit human microbiome research, but microbial communities found throughout the environment.