Competition and warfare in bacteria and the human microbiome

Abstract

Microbial communities contain many evolving and interacting bacteria, which makes them difficult to understand and predict. Using a combination of theory and experiment, we study what it takes for bacteria to succeed in diverse communities like the human microbiome. One way is to actively kill and inhibit competitors and we study the strategies that bacteria use in toxin-mediated warfare. We are now also using our understanding of bacterial competition to try to manipulate gut communities for better health. Our ultimate goal is to both stabilise microbiome communities and remove problem species without the use of antibiotics.

Professor Kevin Foster is the Chair of Microbiology at the Sir William Dunn School of Pathology, University of Oxford. Prior to this, he was Professor of Evolutionary Biology in the departments of Biology and Biochemistry at Oxford. Before Oxford, he had a lab at Harvard as a Bauer Fellow in the FAS Center for Systems Biology. He did his undergrad at Cambridge in Natural Sciences and his Ph.D. at the University of Sheffield in evolutionary biology.

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