Funding from the research council!
I am very happy to share the news that our starting grant application to the Swedish Research Council has been granted 3.3 million SEK of funding for four years! This is fantastic news, as it allows us to further explore the interactions between bacteria in the human microbiome that are important for community stability and resilience to being colonized by pathogens. In the granted project, we will investigate environmental and genetic factors that are important for bacterial invasiveness and community stability in the human gastrointestinal tract.
Within the scope of the project, we will establish model bacterial communities and experimental systems for the human stomach and intestine. We will then investigate how disturbances, such as antibiotic exposure, change the interactions in these microbial communities and their long-term stability. Finally, we aim to identify genes that contribute to successful bacterial colonization or resilience to invasion of established communities in the human microbiome.
Aside from myself, Prof. Sara Lindén and Dr. Kaisa Thorell from the University of Gothenburg as well as Prof. Ed Moore at the university’s Culture Collection will be involved in this project in different ways. We will also collaborate with my former postdoc supervisor Prof. Jo Handelsman as well as Dr. Ophelia Venturelli at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Finally, we will also collaborate with Dr. Åsa Sjöling at the Karolinska Institute. I look forward to work with you all over the coming four years! A big thanks to the Swedish Research Council for believing in this research and investing in making it happen!
Published paper: BacMet Database
It seems like our paper on the recently launched database on resistance genes against antibacterial biocides and metals (BacMet) has gone online as an advance access paper in Nucleic Acids Research today. Chandan Pal – the first author of the paper, and one of my close colleagues as well as my roommate at work – has made a tremendous job taking the database from a list of genes and references, to a full-fledged browsable and searchable database with a really nice interface. I have contributed along the process, and wrote the lion’s share of the code for the BacMet-Scan tool that can be downloaded along with the database files.
BacMet is a curated source of bacterial resistance genes against antibacterial biocides and metals. All gene entries included have at least one experimentally confirmed resistance gene with references in scientific literature. However, we have also made a homology-based prediction of genes that are likely to share the same resistance function (the BacMet predicted dataset). We believe that the BacMet database will make it possible to better understand co- and cross-resistance of biocides and metals to antibiotics within bacterial genomes and in complex microbial communities from different environments.
The database can be easily accessed here: http://bacmet.biomedicine.gu.se, and use of the database in scientific work can cite the following paper, which recently appeared in Nucleic Acids Research:
Pal C, Bengtsson-Palme J, Rensing C, Kristiansson E, Larsson DGJ: BacMet: Antibacterial Biocide and Metal Resistance Genes Database. Nucleic Acids Research. Database issue, advance access. doi: 10.1093/nar/gkt1252 [Paper link]