
Genome editing for the microbial world
Microbes live in communities in, on, and around us, shaping human biology and the world through their collective behavior. An unbalanced human microbiome underlies a growing list of diseases, including cardiovascular disease, Alzheimer’s disease, and antibiotic-resistant infections. Microbes also influence the increasing greenhouse gas concentrations that threaten all life on Earth. The Berkeley Initiative for Optimized Microbiome Editing (BIOME) at the IGI is unlocking the power of CRISPR to understand microbial communities and precisely edit them in their natural environments. Our aim is to enable safe and wide-ranging solutions to currently intractable problems. Specifically, our research areas are:
Rubin BE, Diamond S, Cress BF, Crits-Christoph A, Lou YC, Borges AL, Shivram H, He C, Xu M, Zhou Z, Smith SJ, Rovinsky R, Smock DCJ, Tang K, Owens TK, Krishnappa N, Sachdeva R, Barrangou R, Deutschbauer AM, Banfield JF, and Doudna JA. Nature Microbiology
(2021)Funding for the Berkeley Initiative for Optimized Microbiome Editing comes from the Shurl & Kay Curci Foundation.