About the Editors
Editors-in-Chief
Jean-Marc Ghigo, PhD
Professor, Head of Genetics of Biofilms Laboratory
Institut Pasteur
Paris, France
Dr. Ghigo's research has contributed to a better understanding of the biological resources used by commensal and pathogenic bacteria to form biofilms. The Ghigo lab is currently focusing on the identification of the structures involved in bacteria-surface interactions and of the physiological adaptations to biofilm microenvironments leading to the emergence of biofilm-associated properties, with particular emphasis on biofilm tolerance to antibiotics. Some aspects of his research also aim to translate these fundamental approaches towards clinically relevant situations involving biofilms.
Tiffany Weir, PhD
Department of Food Science and Human Nutrition
Colorado State University
Colorado, USA
Dr. Weir’s research program utilizes clinical and pre-clinical research models to explore the interactions between the diet, gut microbiome, and human health. Current projects include understanding the role of the microbiome in the initiation of obesity-associated vascular dysfunction and exploring how fasting-induced microbiome modulation impacts susceptibility to acute infections. We are also conducting/collaborating on several human clinical studies examining the safety and efficacy of probiotic supplements and prebiotic foods on intestinal and cardiometabolic health.
Omry Koren, PhD
Professor, Head of Microbiome Research Lab
Bar-Ilan University
Safed, Israel
Dr Koren's research focuses on the interactions between the gut microbiota and the host, with a primary interest in the interplay between the microbiota and the host endocrine system. A good example of this is in pregnancy, during which significant changes in microbiota composition, host hormonal levels and immune responsiveness all converge to promote healthy fetal development, and in which certain pregnancy complications may be associated with alterations in the microbiota.
Associate Editors
Adrian-Stefan Andrei, PhD
Department of Plant and Microbial Biology
University of Zurich
Kilchberg, Switzerland
Stefan Andrei’s group, the Microbial Evogenomics Lab (MiEL), utilizes computational biology approaches to unveil and elucidate the ecological processes driving bacterial evolution and adaptation, as well as the mechanisms responsible for microbiome cohesion. In his research, he routinely employs bioinformatics, evolutionary genomics, and multiomics techniques to unravel the eco-evolutionary foundations of microbial diversity.Tom Battin, PhD
Professor
École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL)
Lausanne, Switzerland
Tom Battin's lab, the "Stream Biofilm and Ecosystem Research Laboratory," at EPFL is interested in biofilms, the dominant form of microbial life in streams, and they study the assembly of these microbial “jungles” and the biodiversity dynamics therein ranging from the microbial scale to the scale of the entire stream networks. His principal interest is the microbial ecology and biogeochemistry of stream ecosystems. He is a pioneer in the observation of biofilms in the context of stream dynamics. His research has contributed to the development and use of advanced analytical methods for improving and understanding the structure and function of sedimentary microbial communities in shallow freshwater.
Christophe Beloin, PhD
Associate Professor, Department of Microbiology
Institut Pasteur
Paris, France
Christophe Beloin obtained his PhD in microbiology in 1998. After a 3-year post-doctoral fellowship at Trinity College Dublin, he joined the Institut Pasteur in 2001, first as a post-doctoral researcher and then, in 2003, as an Institut Pasteur Research Fellow in the Biofilm Genetics Unit headed by Jean-Marc Ghigo. In 2014, he was promoted to research director and director of the Institut Pasteur microbiology course. Within the Biofilm Genetics Unit, his group specialises in the identification and characterisation of new bacterial adhesins, with the development of various in vitro and in vivo infection models to evaluate anti-biofilm strategies and gain a better understanding of the extreme recalcitrance of bacterial biofilms to antibiotics.
Benoit Chassaing, PhD
Head, Microbiome-Host Interactions
Institut Pasteur
Paris, France
Dr. Chassaing obtained his PhD in microbiology at the University of Clermont-Ferrand (France), identifying factors involved in the virulence of adherent and invasive Escherichia coli strains (pathovar involved in the etiology of Crohn's disease). He then joined Georgia State University to work on various subjects related to mucosal immunology, trying to decipher how genetic and environmental factors can perturb intestinal microbiota composition in a detrimental way, leading to intestinal inflammation. Dr. Chassaing's laboratory is now located at Institut Pasteur (Paris, France) and focuses on understanding how environmental factors are involved in shaping detrimental microbiota, with a particular focus on intestinal inflammation and metabolic deregulations.
Cheng Gao, PhD
Professor
Institute of Microbiology, Chinese Academy of Sciences (IMCAS)
Beijing, China
Cheng Gao’s Lab at IMCAS is interested in the structure and functioning of plant and environmental microbiome and mycobiome, with an emphasis on mycorrhiza. The Gao lab is currently focusing the deconstruction and reassembly of microbiome, the environmental adaption and stress resistance of microbiome, and the interaction of microbiome and hosts. Dr. Gao gained a background in Microbiology, Ecology, and Multi-Omics from IMCAS and University of California Berkeley.
Tarini Shankar Ghosh, PhD
Assistant Professor, Department of Computational Biology
Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology
New Delhi, India
The research focus of Dr. Ghosh is on translational human microbiome research, using data-driven investigations to facilitate point-of-care microbiome-based diagnostics and microbiome-enabled generic as well as population-specific therapeutics. His group uses a combination of metagenomics and statistical/machine learning to understand microbial communities inhabiting different sites of our body and understanding cross-body-site microbiome interactions. The final goal is to identify microbiome-derived markers of health and disease, the variation of disease signatures across diseases, their association with aging, diet and life-style, as well as formulating novel microbiome-derived clinical end-points associated with different therapeutic interventions.
Erin S Gloag, PhD
Department of Biomedical Sciences and Pathobiology
Virginia Tech
VA, USA
The research mission of the Gloag Lab is to discover and understand the mechanisms by which pathogenic bacterial biofilms persist in a host to establish chronic infections. To achieve this mission the Gloag Lab uses multidisciplinary approaches, including in vitro and in vivo biofilm models, molecular microbiology, rheology, next generation sequencing and microscopy.
Sho Kitamoto, PhD
Associate professor, Department of microbiology and Immunology
University of Osaka
Osaka, Japan
Sho Kitamoto is a specially-appointed associate professor at the University of Osaka. His primary research focus is to uncover the complex host-microbiome interactions involved in the development of gastrointestinal (GI) diseases, including inflammation and cancer, particularly from immunological and microbiological perspectives.
Ara Koh, PhD
Assistant Professor, Department of Life Sciences
POSTECH
Pohang, South Korea
Dr. Ara Koh's research focuses on understanding how the gut microbiome influences human diseases (such as diabetes, cancer, and necrotizing enterocolitis) and responds to therapeutic interventions (including drugs, surgery, and diet). The goal is to develop microbiome-based therapeutics that can reduce inter-individual variations. Specifically, Dr. Koh's lab investigates the role of microbially produced metabolites and their interactions with host signaling pathways, which are important for host metabolism. The research employs various methods such as microbiome community cultures, human tissue-derived organoid systems, cell culture systems, and relevant disease models.
Iñigo Lasa, PhD
Professor, Microbial Pathogenesis unit.
Navarrabiomed-Universidad Publica de Navarra
Pamplona, Spain
Iñigo Lasa is Professor of Microbiology at Universidad Publica de Navarra, Spain since 2008. He received his Ph.D. (1993) from the Universidad Autonoma de Madrid. From 1995 - 1997, he was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Institut Pasteur working in the laboratory of Prof. Pascale Cossart. His research group is dedicated to decipher the regulatory networks involved in biofilm development and the relevance of biofilm formation during bacterial infection.Tiphaine Le Roy, PhD
Assistant Professor
Sorbonne Université, Institut National de la Santé et de la Recherche Médicale
Paris, France
Dr Tiphaine Le Roy's research focuses on the contribution of the gut microbiota to obesity and associated metabolic diseases from the perspective of microbial physiology and how microbes adapt to the gut environment and interact with the host. Her research approaches include the isolation and the in vitro study of novel microbes from the human small intestinal microbiota and the study of host-microbiota interactions using jejunal organoids and animal models.
Gerard Moloney, PhD
Chief Technical Officer, Anatomy and Neuroscience
University College Cork
Cork, Ireland
Dr. Moloney's PhD in APC microbiome Ireland focussed on the inflammatory component of IBD and IBS using clinical and pre-clinical models. Subsequently working in the microbiome gut-brain-axis lab in UCC, he developed an interest in microRNA’s and epigenetics and how they align with the gut microbiome in pre-clinical models, stress, and neurological disorders. His research goal is to progress treatments that harness the microbiome and examine the overlap between the microbiome and the host immune system.
Zakee Sabree, PhD
Associate Professor, Department of Ecology, Evolution and Organismal Biology
Ohio State University
Ohio, USA
Zakee Sabree’s research centers on identifying functional and trophic relationships that forge host-microbe interactions and shape bacterial communities, as well as traits that can predict the evolutionary outcomes of these symbioses. He also has pioneered the development of new insect model systems for host-microbiome research.
Jessica Scoffield, PhD
Associate Professor, Department of Microbiology
University of Alabama at Birmingham
Birmingham, USA
Dr. Jessica Scoffield’s research program studies the role of commensal streptococci in oral and pulmonary polymicrobial infections. The Scoffield Lab utilizes molecular genetics tools, high-throughput sequencing technologies, and animal co-infection models to determine how commensal streptococci integrate into polymicrobial biofilms and restrict microbial pathogenesis.
Nicola Segata, PhD
Professor, Department CIBIO
University of Trento
Trento, Italy
The research of Prof. Nicola Segata employs experimental metagenomic tools and novel computational approaches to study the diversity of the microbiome across conditions and populations and its role in human diseases. The projects in the lab include efforts to profile microbiomes with strain-level resolution, to meta-analyse very large sets of metagenomes with novel computational tools, and to uncover previously uncharacterized members of the human microbiome. The lab of prof. Nicola Segata developed several computational tools and resources that are widely adopted by the microbiome research community and enabled a number of metagenomic-based discoveries.
João Gabriel Souza,PhD
Professor, Dental Research Division
Guarulhos University
Guarulhos, SP, Brazil
Currently, my research focuses on understanding the function of microbial communities in the oral disease process, host response, and the development of new antimicrobial biomaterials. Since biofilm-related diseases are the main reason for implantable device failure in the oral environment, I have focused on understanding this condition, modulating factors, and developing new implantable devices with improved biological responses and microbial control. We have provided new insights into how systemic and local conditions in the oral environment modulate biofilm growth and its composition, triggering inflammatory processes during oral infections.Liang Yang, PhD
Professor, Department of Pharmacology
School of Medicine, Southern University of Science and Technology
Shenzhen, P. R. China
At the fundamental level, the combination of molecular biology, chemical biology and systems biology tools is used to examine how bacterial quorum sensing and c-di-GMP signaling mediate formation of mono-species and multiple-species biofilms. At the applied level, high-throughput screening tools are used to discover active compounds that can impair bacterial virulence and biofilm formation. At the translational level, clinical isolates of major nosocomial pathogens are monitored for their antibiotic resistance and genome adaptation in relation to biofilm lifestyle.Egija Zaura, DDS, PhD
University Research Chair, Professor, Oral Microbioal Ecology, Department of Preventive Dentistry
Academic Centre for Dentistry Amsterdam (ACTA), Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and University of Amsterdam
Amsterdam, the Netherlands
My research topics span from biofilm models and clinical studies to advanced molecular technologies in oral microbial diagnostics and complex sequencing data analyses. My current principal interests lay on oral microbial ecology at health and disease, and translating this fundamental knowledge to the clinical practice.
Founding Editor-in-Chief
Staffan Normark
Professor, Karolinska Institutet, Sweden
Since the 1970s, Prof. Normark has performed pioneering work on genetic engineering, molecular biology, and microbial pathogenesis. He was the Permanent Secretary of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences from 2010 to 2015.
Emeritus Editor-in-Chief
Alain Filloux, PhD
Director of SCELSE
Nanyang Technological University
Singapore
Prof. Alain Filloux is an international leader in studying Pseudomonas aeruginosa pathogenesis. He pointed to the existence of bacterial protein secretion systems, which later became known as types (T1SS, T2SS, T3SS, etc.) and published seminal papers on the T2SS.
Cathy Lozupone, PhD
Prof. Anschutz Medical Campus School of Medicine
University of Colorado Boulder
USA
Dr. Catherine Lozupone is an Associate Professor at the Anschutz Medical Campus School of Medicine. Catherine's expertise is microbiology of the human gut and impacts on health, development of bioinformatics techniques for analysis of marker gene and genomic sequence data. The main focus of her research is to understand factors that shape human microbiota composition in health and disease and to elucidate the functional consequences of compositional differences, both in terms of the biological/metabolic properties of individual bacteria and host interactions. Dr. Lozupone developed popular tools for microbiome data analysis, most notably the UniFrac Algorithm .
Advisory Editors
Javier Martinez Vesga
Javier joined Nature Communications in January 2018. He received his PhD in Virology from the University of Saarland in Germany where he studied HIV-1 drug-resistant variants. After that he moved to the Helmholtz Centre for Infection Research in Braunschweig where he did research on host-acting broad-spectrum antiviral drugs. He then joined the University Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona as Assistant Professor where he taught microbiology and focused his research on HIV latency and RNA viruses. Javier is based in the Berlin office and primarily handles papers in the fields of human and animal microbiomes, host-microbes and bacteriology.
Emily White
Emily received a B.Sc. in Microbiology and further developed her knowledge by studying for a PhD in Microbiology at the University of Manchester. Her time was split between the laboratories of Ian Roberts and Richard Grencis, looking at the interactions between the mammalian intestinal microbiota and the intestinal helminth parasite Trichuris muris. Emily joined the Nature Microbiology team in November 2016 where she handles papers on the microbiome and microbial ecology. Emily has been Advisory Editor on npj Biofilms and Microbiomes since July 2021.
Editorial Board
Fredrik Bäckhed, PhD, Department of Molecular and Clinical Medicine, University of Gothenburg, Sweden
Jill Banfield, PhD, Department of Environmental Science, Policy, & Management, University of California, Berkeley, California, USA
Ehud Banin, PhD, The Mina and Everard Goodman Faculty of Life Sciences, Bar-Ilan University, Israel
Martin J Blaser, PhD, Center for Advanced Biotechnology and Medicine at Rutgers University, New Jersey, USA
Cameron Currie, PhD, Department of Bacteriology, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Wisconsin, USA
Joël Doré, PhD, Unit for Ecology and Physiology of the Digestive System, French National Institute for Agricultural Research (INRA), France
Nicole Dubilier, PhD, Department of Symbiosis, Max Planck Institute for Marine Microbiology, Bremen, Germany
Hans-Curt Flemming, PhD, Biofilm Centre, Faculty of Chemistry, University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany
Hervé Guillou, PhD, Unit ToxAlim, French National Institute for Agricultural Research (INRA), Toulouse, France
Bill Hanage, PhD, Department of Epidemiology, Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health, Massachusettes, USA
Susanne Häussler, PhD, Head of Molecular Bacteriology, TWINCORE, Hannover, Germany,
Harald Horn, PhD, Engler-Bunte-Institut, Water Chemistry and Water Technology, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Germany
Jurg Keller, PhD, Advanced Water Management Centre, University of Queensland, Australia
Hiroaki Kitano, PhD, The Systems Biology Institute, Tokyo, Japan
Rob Knight, PhD, Departments of Pediatrics and Computer Science & Engineering, University of California at San Diego, California, USA
Ilana Kolodkin-Gal, PhD, The Robert H. Smith Faculty of Agriculture, Food and Environment, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Rehovot, Israel
Katherine P. Lemon, PhD, Baylor College of Medicine, Texas, USA
Jose L. Lopez-Ribot, PhD, Department of Biology, The University of Texas at San Antonio, Texas, USA
Sandra L. McLellan, PhD, School of Freshwater Sciences, University of Wisconsin, WI, USA
Annette Moter, PhD, Biofilmcenter, German Heart Center Berlin, Berlin, Germany
Thomas R. Neu, PhD, Department of River Ecology, Centre for Environmental Research - UFZ, Magdeburg, Germany
Jens Nielsen, PhD, Department of Biology and Biological Engineering, Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden
Staffan Normark, PhD, Department of Microbiology, Tumor and Cell Biology, Karolinska Institutet, Sweden
Victoria Orphan, PhD, Division of Geological and Planetary Sciences, California Institute of Technology, California, USA
Sven Pettersson, PhD, Department of Microbiology, Tumor and Cell Biology, Karolinska Institutet, Sweden
Lutgarde Raskin, PhD, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of Michigan, Michigan, USA
David A. Relman, PhD, Department of Microbiology and Immunology, Stanford University, California, USA
Scott A. Rice, PhD, The School of Biological Sciences, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, Singapore
Agneta Richter-Dahlfors, PhD, Swedish Medical Nanoscience Center, Karolinska Institutet, Sweden
Michael S. Robeson, PhD, University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences, Arkansas, USA
Ute Römling, PhD, Department of Microbiology, Tumor and Cell Biology, Karolinska Institutet, Sweden
Philippe Sansonetti, PhD, Laboratory of Molecular Microbial Pathogenesis, Institut Pasteur, Paris, France
Phil Stewart, PhD, Centre for Biofilm Engineering, Montana State University, Montana, USA
Marc Strous, PhD, Energy Bioengineering and Geomicrobiology Research Group, University of Calgary, Alberta, Canada
Tim Tolker-Nielsen, PhD, Department of Immunology and Microbiology, University of Copenhagen, Denmark
Willy Verstraete, PhD, Emeritus Professor, Laboratory of Microbial Ecology and Technology (LabMET), Faculty of Bioscience Engineering, Ghent University, Belgium
Tom Van de Wiele, PhD, Laboratory of Microbial Ecology and Technology, Ghent University, Belgium
Bryan A. White, PhD, Department of Animal Sciences, University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, Illinois, USA
Marvin Whiteley, PhD, Georgia Tech, Georgia, USA
Sandrine Ellero-Simatos, PhD, Toxalim (Research Centre in Food Toxicology), INRAE, ENVT, INP-Purpan, UPS, Université de Toulouse ,Toulouse, France
Fanette Fontaine, PhD, Université Paris Cité, Paris, France
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