Diversity is the key to survival for beneficial bacteria living in your gut. Now, scientists have new tools to explore this diversity.
microbiome
Venturelli Receives 2023 Early Career Innovator Award
Ophelia Venturelli received the award in recognition of her work to elucidate the molecular and ecological design principles of microbial communities.
When Antibiotics Deplete Our Gut Microbiome, a Human Gut Pathogen Takes Advantage
A deleterious bacterial infection can take hold when the diverse community of bacteria in the gut microbiome are killed with antibiotics.
Machine learning begins to understand the human gut
New computer model accurately predicts behavior of millions of microbial communities from hundreds of experiments, an advance toward precision medicine.
A key control knob for microbiome metabolism
Researchers are uncovering the complex mechanisms by which human gut bacteria accomplish a variety of functions, from transforming compounds derived from food into nutrition for the host to producing molecules that impact human behavior and performance. The Venturelli Lab has now overturned prior knowledge about how polysaccharide utilization loci (PULs) mediate the fitness and community-level …
Computational design of microbial communities
Microbial communities are everywhere in the environment. The interactions among these complex networks of organisms shape the overall community function and metabolism, sometimes in unexpected ways. In a paper published May 31 in Nature Communications, a team led by University of Wisconsin–Madison assistant professor of biochemistry Ophelia Venturelli describes a generalizable, model-driven framework to predict …
Venturelli Lab develops computational model to predict butyrate production in the human gut microbiome
Researchers have developed the capability to predict and design the metabolic activities of microbial communities, which has broad implications for human health, agriculture and bioprocessing. In a paper released May 31st in Nature Communications [link], Biochemistry Assistant Professor Ophelia Venturelli and Ryan Clark, formerly a postdoc in the Venturelli lab and now of Nimble Therapeutics, …
Venturelli Lab receives R21 to research antibiotic resistant genes
Biochemistry Assistant Professor Ophelia Venturelli has been awarded an Exploratory/ Developmental Research Grant (R21) by the National Institutes of Health (NIH). The award is in support of the development of new methods to uncover associations between antibiotic resistance genes and microbial hosts in the human gut microbiome. The rise and spread of bacteria that are …
NIH funds R01 grant to study a model-guided design of next-generation bacterial therapeutics to treat cardiovascular disease
Ophelia Venturelli (Biochemistry) in collaboration with Philip Romero (Biochemistry) and Federico Rey (Bacteriology) were awarded an R01 grant through the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering. The award will provide a total of $2.7M over four years. The team will develop computational modeling and optimization techniques to design next-generation bacterial therapeutics that sense major …
Venturelli receives Gates Grand Challenges Grant for exploratory work on microbiome and malnutrition
With a Grand Challenges Explorations grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, University of Wisconsin–Madison scientists Ophelia Venturelli and Brian Pfleger are working to further research on how to use human-associated intestinal microbes to combat malnutrition in developing countries.