Gut Check: Exploring Your Microbiome

About This Course

Imagine if there were an organ in your body that weighed as much as your brain, that affected your health, your weight, and even your behavior. Wouldn’t you want to know more about it? There is such an organ — the collection of microbes in and on your body, your human microbiome.

Language
English, Subtitles: Catalan

How to Pass
Pass all graded assignments to complete the course.

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Instructors:

Rob Knight

Professor
Pediatrics and Computer Science & Engineering. Director, Center for Microbiome Innovation, University of California, San Diego
University of California, San Diego
University of Colorado Boulder

Rob Knight is the founding Director of the Center for Microbiome Innovation, an Agile Center in the Jacobs School of Engineering with the School of Medicine and the Division of Biological Sciences as founding partners, and is a Professor in UC San Diego’s Departments of Pediatrics and Computer Science & Engineering. Before that he was Professor of Chemistry & Biochemistry and Computer Science in the BioFrontiers Institute of the University of Colorado at Boulder, and an HHMI Early Career Scientist. He is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and of the American Academy of Microbiology. In 2015 he received the Vilceck Prize in Creative Promise for the Life Sciences. He is the author of “Follow Your Gut: The Enormous Impact of Tiny Microbes” (Simon & Schuster, 2015) and spoke at TED in 2014. His lab has produced many of the software tools and laboratory techniques that enabled high-throughput microbiome science, including the QIIME pipeline (cited over 5000 times as of this writing) and UniFrac (cited over 3000 times including its web interface). He is co-founder of the Earth Microbiome Project, the American Gut Project, and the company Biota, Inc., which uses DNA from microbes in the subsurface to guide oilfield decisions. His work has linked microbes to a range of health conditions including obesity and inflammatory bowel disease, has enhanced our understanding of microbes in environments ranging from the oceans to the tundra, and and made high-throughput sequencing techniques accessible to thousands of researchers around the world. Rob can be followed on Twitter (@knightlabnews) or on his web site http://knightlab.ucsd.edu/.

Dr. Jessica L. Metcalf

Senior Research Associate
BioFrontiers Institute
University of Colorado Boulder

Jessica Metcalf is an evolutionary biologist who is fascinated by old things. At the core of her research is the use of ancient DNA methods to directly sample genes from the past to answer questions in ecology, evolution, conservation, forensics and history. Whether only weeks old, from historic times or the late Pleistocene, DNA preserved in bone, teeth, hair, tissue, coprolites, plant material and soil can solve mysteries about the past.

Jessica has a Bachelor of Science in Chemistry from the University of Georgia (2000) and a doctorate degree in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology from University of Colorado (2007). Jessica was trained in ancient DNA techniques during her postdoctoral research at the Australian Centre for Ancient DNA in Adelaide, Australia. She joined Rob Knight's lab in 2011 to investigate the potential for microbes to help us understand the past. She studies the ancestral human gut microbiome by studying microbial DNA preserved in ancient human fecal material. Jessica also studies the role of microbes in decomposition, which has led to several fascinating findings that are important for forensic science.

Dr. Katherine R. Amato

Postdoctoral Research Associate
Department of Anthropology, BioFrontiers Institute
University of Colorado Boulder

Katherine Amato is a post-doc at the University of Colorado Boulder. Her research focuses on the gut microbiota and how it helps wild primates survive in the habitats they occupy. She is also interested in the role gut microbes have played in the evolution of both primate and human diet and physiology. Katherine is fluent in Spanish and does most of her fieldwork in the rainforests of Mexico and Central America. In addition to her work with primates, she contributes to the American Gut project and is involved in several other projects focused on non-Western human populations. Katherine completed her undergraduate degree in Biology at Dartmouth College in 2007 and received a Fulbright Fellowship to study howler monkeys in Mexico after graduating. She earned her Ph.D. in Ecology, Evolution, and Conservation Biology from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2013. Her research has been funded primarily by National Geographic and the National Science Foundation.

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Gut Check: Exploring Your Microbiome

Rob Knight

Dr. Jessica L. Metcalf

Dr. Katherine R. Amato

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