Phages in the infant gut: good, bad or neutral?

Bacteriophages are the most abundant biological entity on the planet. They can be beneficial for human health by killing off pathogenic bacteria, but phages that integrate into the bacterial chromosome can also be detrimental to human health, by encoding genes that make the bacteria more virulent. The presence of different types of phages in the infant gut can, therefore, have widely varying consequences for long-term health, an aspect of the microbiome that is currently vastly understudied.

The project will use established methods to discover new bacteriophages against bifidobacteria and investigate their effects on natural bacterial communities in the infant gut through model systems and next-generation sequencing.