Bacterial phenomics

Phenomics is a fascinating field with far-reaching consequences for the control and prevention of infectious disease, across species and across the world.

It explores compounded genome-encoded interactions, enabling us to map the regions of a bacterial genome. This builds a rapid, accurate picture of how they contribute to the expression of complex phenotypes and, in turn, disease.

This powerful new knowledge can help us more effectively target antimicrobial drugs, reduce the growing resistance to today's antibiotics and develop new vaccines to control infectious diseases in both humans and animals.

A focus on complex phenotypes

While it’s relatively simple to conceptualise the role of a single gene with a single function, responsible for a single process (and this is incorporated in what we do), many of the phenotypes that interest us in the context of infectious disease are far more complex.

In some cases, subtle allelic variation or changes to the balance of gene expression can also have a major or series of cumulative minor contributions (both positive and negative) on the ability of a pathogen to cause disease.

Genome sequencing has undergone unprecedented acceleration and cost reduction in recent years, but the speed at which it’s possible to relate a complex phenotype based solely on genomic data hasn’t kept pace. A key focus of our research is to combine laboratory and computational technologies to address this mismatch.