Isolation of unknown human gut anaerobes
The advances in sequencing technologies and computational tools have improved our understanding of 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 levels 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