Brown Lab | Georgia Institute of Technology

Research

 

Interactions, communities and disease

Microbial model systems offer unparalleled access to the molecular mechanisms and ecological forces that together shape evolution, making them powerful systems for addressing fundamental behavioural, ecological and evolutionary questions. In our work, these questions include – why cooperate? Why communicate? Why kill your host? At the same time, a continual lab challenge is to consider – what are the practical implications of our discoveries? Can they drive novel therapeutics or diagnostics? Do they point to unappreciated epidemiological or evolutionary risks? Can we develop sustainable, evolution-proof therapeutics?

Our work can be broadly organized into three overlapping themes, click below for more info

Social interactions: cooperation, communication and conflict

Community dynamics: Microbiomes and biofilms  

Disease: Virulence, resistance, novel therapeutics

 

In the lab’s recently published paper, Antibiotics Drive Expansion of Rare Pathogens in a Chronic Infection Microbiome Model, (Varga, J., Zhao, C., Davis, J.D., Hao, Y., Farrell, J.M., et al., 2021), antibiotic treatments against C.F. in a synthetic infection microbiome model produced large community fluctuations and alternative community states. However, compositional analysis alone cannot separate the relative importance of differential survival versus differential expansion, thus, our researchers examined species absolute abundance data to test whether pathogens undergo competitive release in response to this antibiotic exposure. Click the image to read our paper and find out more!
Here we see the biogeography of the human body, discussed in The Biogeography of Polymicrobial Infection (Stacy, A., McNally, L., Brown, S.P., et al., 2015), which highlights the importance of spatial positioning in the study of polymicrobial infections.
Although these mobile genetic elements (MGEs) – such as plasmids, prophages, pathogenicity islands, etc. – are fundamentally self-interested entities, usually functioning for their own gain, they frequently carry genes beneficial for their hosts and/ or neighbors of their hosts.