We are a multi-disciplinary team that is seeking to understand the role of the microbiome, particularly during the early life developmental window. We have this focus as pregnancy and infancy, and the microbes that colonise during this time (e.g. Bifidobacterium), coincides with key physiological programming, and is when the foundations of future health and wellbeing are laid down.

Our labs research programme is organised into three complimentary themes (i) microbe-diet interactions and personalised nutrition, (ii) infection resistance and antimicrobial resistance and (iii) microbiota-host crosstalk including several diseases; IBD and cancer.

These themes are interlinked by large longitudinal clinical studies, including a preterm infant cohort (BAMBI) and a mother-infant study (PEARL). Our clinical studies underpin our wider research activities, which comprise a series of coordinated investigations addressing the mechanistic foundation of microbiome-host interactions in health and disease, with the aim of intervention and therapy development.

The lab utilises multi-disciplinary approaches to answer these key questions including; microbiology (model-colon chemostat systems, molecular microbiology, cultureomics), metabolomics, next generation sequencing (RNASeq, 16S rRNA, WGS, metagenomics; both host and microbe), bioinformatics tools, in vivo models (germ-free and infection models) and human studies.

As a group we are passionate about sharing our research and the science of the microbiota, through public engagement, talks and through the media. A great example is our Guardians of the Gut project!

Lindsay is also Chair of Microbiome Research, Microbiology and Infection at the University of Birmingham.