Understanding and Combatting Resistome Exchange Across Commensal, Environmental, and Pathogenic Microbes
Antibiotic resistance is an urgent global public health challenge. To better understand and predict the transmission and evolutionary dynamics of microbial communities and their resistomes across time and habitats, we apply a combination of high-throughput functional metagenomic selections, 16S phylogenetic profiling, whole metagenome shotgun sequencing, and bioinformatics tools. We complement these ‘omics’ investigations with mechanistic physiological, genetic, and biochemical analyses of novel resistance mechanisms to design surveillance and therapeutic strategies to mitigate their spread into clinical pathogens.