Home Department: undeclared
Mentor: Benjamin Good, Applied Physics
“New Computational Tools for Measuring the Relationship Between Ecological and Evolutionary Changes in the Human Microbiome”
The composition of the human gut microbiome has been extensively studied at the species level, but much less is known about how the organisms in the microbiome evolve over time. Layton will develop computational tools that leverage publicly available sequencing data from human microbiomes to determine whether evolutionary changes within microbial species influence the ecological structure at the species level. The results of this analysis will have important implications for therapeutic interventions like fecal microbiome transplants to treat infections, as well as for broader efforts to understand how the microbiome affects human health.