Benjamin Good
Stanford University, CA·Ecology & Evolution
Bacteria in the human gut evolve fast enough to change within one person's lifetime. Billions of new mutations arise in each person's gut microbiota every day.
- Fields
Ecology & Evolution
Microbiology & Immunology
Biophysics
- Topics
gut microbiota
gut microbiome
microbial evolution
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Jun 2027
What they work on
- Develop time-series methods that track linked mutations in human gut metagenomes sampled repeatedly over time. These will measure the strength and duration of natural selection on sweeping variants.
- Test whether genetic sweeps in gut bacteria coincide with broader shifts in the community's taxonomic or functional composition, using longitudinal human metagenome data.
- Use transposon insertion libraries, in which mobile DNA disrupts individual genes, to measure the rates and fitness effects of spontaneous beneficial mutations in ex-germ-free mice.
- Build a mechanistic model that predicts how ecological diversity shapes short-term evolution in gut communities competing for common metabolites.
More about the research
The researchers and others have shown that genetic changes can sweep through resident gut bacteria in a few months, or even a few days. This rapid evolution may affect how antibiotic resistance spreads and whether fecal microbiome transplants succeed. Yet little is known about which evolutionary forces act inside such complex communities. Scientists also lack a population genetics framework for predicting how mutations spread when many interacting strains live together. Population genetics is the study of how gene variants change in frequency over time.
Why it matters
Gut microbes help keep people healthy and reduce susceptibility to disease. Knowing how these bacteria evolve inside a person could help predict how the microbiota responds to and recovers from drugs or diet changes. It could also shed light on how antibiotic resistance mutations spread. These insights may guide the design of personalized microbiome-based therapies, such as fecal microbiome transplants.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Oana Carja
Carnegie Mellon University, PA·Ecology & Evolution·Early-career
Model how heterogeneous spatial population structure shapes competition between beneficial mutations, the crossing of rugged fitness landscapes and genetic hitchhiking of neutral mutations, using new mathematical and computational frameworks.
Michael Manhart
Rutgers University-New Brunswick, NJ·Ecology & Evolution
Test whether cross-feeding different nutrient types (amino acids, vitamins, carbon intermediates) changes the fitness effects of mutations differently, using engineered E. coli auxotroph partnerships and DNA-barcoded mutant libraries.
Meng Wu
Washington University in St Louis, MO·Microbiology & Immunology·Early-career
Identify the gut stromal cell populations that fail to produce the immune signals needed for B-cell development and antibody production, using germ-free mice colonized with gut microbes from human donors who responded poorly to oral cholera vaccine.
The school
Stanford University: 87 labs on PI Pages, $1.6B a year on research, 739 research doctorates a year.
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