Research Projects
Streptococcus spp. generate unsaturated fatty acids through an enzyme known as FabM, and these unsaturated lipids are critical for Streptococcus spp. to withstand stresses such acid, antibiotics, and reactive oxygen species. This study aims to determine how these unsaturated fatty acids are protective, and if they are essential for the ability of Streptococcus spp. to cause disease in various contexts.
Resistance of pathogenic microbes to antibiotics is a growing worldwide concern, with global deaths due to antibiotic resistance predicted to overtake global deaths due to cancer and become the #1 cause of death worldwide by 2050. This project, funded by the Research Council of Norway, partners research labs from the Norwegian Institute of Public Health, the University of Oslo, TATA Consultancy Services (based in Delhi, India), the University of Campinas (Piracicaba, Brazil), McGill University (Montreal, Canada), the University of Illinois at Chicago, the Forsyth Institute, and OHSU to engage diverse trainees, clinicians, and scientists in educational outreach regarding the accelerating antibiotic resistance crisis and antibiotic stewardship.
Nanopore sequencing technologies have gained considerable traction in recent years, with a critical inflection point in the sequencing industry being reached in 2022 when the Oxford Nanopore Technologies (ONT) sequencing platform acheived an accuracy on par with industry standard Illumina short-read sequencing. The Baker Lab was an early adapter of ONT technology, and in 2022 published the first protocols to obtain multiple complete bacterial genomes simultaneously directly from saliva using ONT sequencing. We plan to continue to leverage this technology to blaze new trails in oral microbiome research, specifically in regards to completing genomes of novel species, and examining the oral epigenome and epitranscriptome at scale.