Microbial Communities in Health, Disease, and Sustainable Agriculture

We offer student projects investigating microbial communities in the human gut, plant roots, and agricultural soils. Projects address questions such as:

• how gut microbiome disruption in early life links to asthma and allergy,
• how plasmids spread antibiotic resistance through environmental settings,
• how microbial interactions shape root microbiome assembly and plant health.

Our research has direct applied perspectives including combating antibiotic resistance, developing microbiome-based treatments for inflammatory and allergic disease, and designing biopesticides and biofertilisers as sustainable alternatives to chemical inputs. Both experimental and bioinformatic project types are available.

Techniques covered:

• Classic culturing and anaerobic microbiology
• High-throughput interaction screening
• FACS sorting and fluorescence microscopy
• PCR, qPCR, and metagenomics sequencing
• Bioinformatic and network analysis

Keywords:
Microbiomes, human health, plant microbiome, plasmids, antibiotic resistance, network analysis, biopesticides, agricultural probiotics

Contact

Professor Søren J. Sørensen
sjs@bio.ku.dk