META CENTER STUDY SHOWS THAT THE GUT CAN PROMOTE INTERBACTERIAL CONFLICT

A research team from the META Center led by postdoctoral fellow Travis Wiles, student Matthew Jemielita*, and faculty members Judith Eisen, Karen Guillemin, and Raghuveer Parthasarathy has discovered that intestinal peristalsis is a major driver of competition between gut bacteria. Their findings, published in PLoS Biology, indicate that the spatial structure of bacterial communities may be critical in determining the composition of gut microbiota. A synopsis of this work can be found here.
 
*Matthew Jemielita is currently a postdoctoral fellow in Bonnie Bassler’s lab at Princeton University.

August 1, 2016