A bacterium that cannot grow on glucose

The Rakoff-Nahoum lab uses tools of a broad toolkit in microbiology, immunology, host and bacterial genetics, gnotobiotics, bioinformatics and computational biology, centered in ecological and evolutionary frameworks, to understand how microbes interact with the environment, each other and their host. The driving principle of the lab is that by understanding the molecular, genetic, ecological, and evolutionary mechanisms of how microbiome communities form and shape, with focus on the pediatric population, and how the microbiome influences host tissue and physiological systems over time and across health and disease, we can design targeted, ecologically- and mechanistically- rationale interventions to engineer a healthy and normative microbiome-host axis.