News

Making Nutrition and Healthcare Personalized, Predictive, and Preventive

Dr. Sean Gibbons is creating a new precision nutrition platform called My Digital Gut that leverages the gut microbiome to make nutrition and healthcare personalized, predictive, and preventive. In an ISB Research Roundtable presentation, Gibbons spoke about My Digital Gut and other microbiome-related projects studied in his lab.   

Building a Better BMI

ISB researchers have constructed biological body mass index (BMI) measures that offer a more accurate representation of metabolic health and are more varied, informative and actionable than the traditional, long-used BMI equation. The work was published in the journal Nature Medicine. 

Seattle Science Foundation and ISB

ISB and Seattle Science Foundation Partner to Create Video Series

What are multi-omics? Why does our microbiome matter? What’s the difference between genetics and genomics? What is a digital twin? ISB and Seattle Science Foundation have partnered to create videos answering questions like these and more, showcasing ISB scientists and their work.

NIH Logo

Gibbons Lab Awarded NIH R01 to Explore Precision Nutrition

The ecological structure of the human gut microbiome helps determine nutritional and phenotypic responses to diet. However, a clear mapping does not yet exist between diet, gut microbial ecology, gut microbial community metabolism, and human metabolic phenotypes. This proposal, entitled “CyberGut: towards personalized human-microbiome metabolic modeling for precision health and nutrition“, provides five years of funding from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) for the design and testing of an…

Dr. Christian Diener, postdoc in ISB's Gibbons Lab.

New Modeling Tool Allows Microbiome Researchers to Map Community Ecology to Ecosystem Function

A promising new open-source metabolic modeling tool provides microbiome researchers a path forward in predicting ecosystem function from community structure. News of the software package, called MICOM, was developed in part by researchers in ISB’s Gibbons Lab, and its uses were published in the journal mSystems.

Using Blood to Predict Gut Microbiome Diversity

Predicting the alpha diversity of an individual’s gut microbiome is possible by examining metabolites in the blood. The robust relationship between host metabolome and gut microbiome diversity opens the door for a fast, cheap and reliable blood test to identify individuals with low gut diversity.

Alex Carr Joins the Lab

Alex Carr will join the Institute for Systems Biology for his PhD work, co-advised by Nitin Baliga and Sean Gibbons. Alex is a graduate student in the Molecular Engineering Program at the University of Washington. Prior to starting graduate school at UW, Alex worked in Adam Arkin’s lab at UC Berkeley, characterizing species-species interactions in synthetic gut bacterial communities. For his dissertation, Alex will pursue novel experimental and computational approaches…