Research

How does species richness vary across animal gut microbiomes?

Here, we see that on average, chordates tend to have the highest diversity of gut microbes compared to invervetebrates (non-blue colors). However, there are some interesting exceptions. We are currently trying to understand the underlying mechanisms behind this pattern.

Our current human gut microbiome collection progress

While major advances have been made in comparative human gut microbiome studies, European and North American subjects are still overrepresented in the literature. A major goal of the Gut Microbiome Tree of Life Project is to diversify public datasets with underrepresented communities across the world including indigenous tribes such as the Hadza tribe and those from the Amazon. This map shows our current progress.

Global climate interactions with animal gut microbiomes

Because our dataset consists of wild animals from around the world, we are interested in how climate factors such as latitude, temperature, and elevation, can impact gut microbiome diversity and composition. This analysis is led by Akhil Kommala.

A list of current projects:

Multi-omic multivariate analysis of the GMTOL dataset in its entirety
Global climate analysis
Global human gut microbiome analysis
Database curation and access
Fish gut microbiome analysis
Reptile gut microbiome analysis
Bird gut microbiome analysis
Data collection automation
reach out to @poopomics on Twitter for collaboration ideas/questions!

Scrollthrough to read our proposal

Project Description_final.pdf