The Oh Lab studies the human microbiome for its potential to deliver treatments for infectious and other diseases. (Image by Alex Valm, NHGRI)
The long-term goal of our research program is to create new microbiome-based therapeutics for skin disease, with implications for a wide range of inflammatory diseases. Our lab is dually computational and experimental - we develop advanced algorithms and analyses using shotgun metagenomic sequencing data for the purpose of reconstructing the structure and dynamics of microbial communities, and we complement our genomic predictions with in vitro and in vivo experiments to investigate gene function, visualize microbes, or test mechanism of action. Much of our work is focused on the human skin microbiome, and we also study the gut and airway microbiota to better understand systemic and local interactions of the microbiome with the immune system.
Our lab’s basic framework is to use our computational approaches to create highly informative maps of the fundamental characteristics of healthy vs. diseased microbiomes, to use cultivation, CRISPR, and experimental models to test our genomics-driven hypotheses and to define a phenotype for individual microbes, then finally, to identify and create strategies to engineer the microbiome for therapeutic purposes.
Our current major disease areas of interest include: aging, skin disease, infectious disease, skin cancer, immunotherapy response and immunotherapy-associated side effects, chronic fatigue syndrome and other pro-inflammatory diseases.
Some of our research projects that span these disease areas include:
In these projects, we use diverse technologies such as metagenomics, comparative genomics, single cell, culturomics, imaging, metabolomics, CRISPR, synthetic biology, metabolomics, and high-throughput screening.
Five-year grant funds first study of genetic diversity and function of S. epidermidis strains to reveal a shift from benign...
Wei has a strong background in host-microbe interaction and evolution of microbial pathogens. He is interested in developing computational...
Our central goal is to develop microbiome therapeutics to treat human disease. We use diverse tools like genomics and synthetic biology to...
Oh’s research to date has produced seminal findings on the microbial communities of the human skin.
Akintunde plans to develop single cell sequencing technology to define "dark matter" microorganisms, and search for bacteria that encode...
Applies bioinformatics and machine learning algorithm methodologies to explore high-dimensional genomic datasets with an emphasis on...
Mutations in SARS-CoV-2 are generating viral variants that change the properties of the virus and affect the response to the...
Engineering the human skin microbiome to treat diseases and prevent infections.
Where do a baby’s first microbes come from and what controls which bugs stick around?
This JAX short course brings together world-renowned experts in addiction, human genetics, and mouse genetics. Through a combination of...
JAX, UConn researchers explore how patients’ microbiome, and risk of infection, change after time in a skilled nursing...
New JAX research offers insight into how our immune cells are able to tell the difference between helpful bacterial strains and potentially...
Julia Oh probes the depths of human skin to characterize the microbial communities that contribute to health and disease.
“Microbial dark matter" undoubtedly contains key information about how our microbiome contributes to human health and disease. But how do...
A grant of $225,000 from the Maximilian E. & Marion O. Hoffman Foundation, Inc., will provide funding to support a postdoctoral fellow at...
Machine learning platforms can be fed data to "teach" them to learn patterns and predict outcomes, and they are becoming...
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