Dr. Sean Gibbons, assistant professor at the Institute for Systems Biology and a Washington Research Foundation Distinguished Investigator, discusses with Nature Computational Science how he uses computational science to gain insights into the gut microbiome and to address the major challenges of this field, as well as his advice to young LGBTQIA+ scientists.
The strongest associations with weight loss success or failure – independent of BMI – are found in the genetic capacity of the gut microbiome. These new findings open the door to diagnostic tests that can identify people likely to lose weight with healthy lifestyle changes and those who might need more drastic interventions.
In ISB’s first-ever Research Roundtable event, Assistant Professor Dr. Sean Gibbons delivered a presentation titled “Gut-Check: Personalized Nutrition and Your Microbiome.” His talk covered a lot of ground, including recently published research showing how the health of our microbiomes can predict longevity, and how we can build and maintain a healthy gut microbiome.
ISB researchers examined the associations between the gut microbiomes of about 3,400 people and roughly 150 host characteristics. The team looked at diet, medication use, clinical blood markers, and other lifestyle and clinical factors, and found evidence that variations of the gut microbiome are associated with health and disease.
ISB’s virtual course and symposium focusing on the microbiome and its future role in precision medicine will take place on October 15 and 16. The event’s website went live earlier this week. The virtual course will be taught by Sean Gibbons, Christian Diener, Tomasz Wilmanski, Noa Rappaport, Alex Carr, Priyanka Baloni and Nathan Price. Symposium speakers are Jason Papin (University of Virginia), Ines Thiele (National University of Ireland, Galway), Thomas…
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.
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.
The human microbiome is a relatively new area of research, and there are numerous questions surrounding it. What is the human microbiome? Can we change it? Does it make us sick? Keep us well? ISB Assistant Professor and microbiome researcher Dr. Sean Gibbons answers these questions — and many more.
Christian Diener will join the Institute for Systems Biology as the Washington Research Foundation Distinguished Postdoctoral Fellow in the Gibbons Lab. Christian is a computational biologist who has worked extensively on yeast systems biology and has recently moved into studying the human microbiome. He completed his PhD in systems biology at the Max Plank Institute for Molecular Genetics and is currently working at the National Institute for Genome Medicine in…
