Isolation and characterization of unknown taxa from human gut microbiota. Isolation of unknown human gut anaerobes

The advances in sequencing technologies and computational tools have improved our understanding of the gut microbiota complexity, enabling the identification of a large number of species previously undescribed using culture-dependent approaches. However, most of these microbes remain uncharacterized at both genomic and functional level and the potential interaction of these new species with the host is still poorly understood. The aim of the project is to expand the repertoire of cultivated bacteria from the human microbiota and to characterize their whole-genome based phylogeny and in vitro metabolism, deciphering the mechanisms that drive their potential interaction with human health.