Karsten Zengler Research Group

University of California, San Diego

How can targeted interventions alter complex microbial communities to improve host health? The lab uses community systems biology to study microbe–microbe and microbe–host interactions with combined experimental and computational approaches. Researchers apply multi-omics, metatranscriptomics, and metatranslatomics to identify mechanisms of competition between pathogens and resident microbiota. The group builds genome-scale metabolic and machine-learning models to predict competition, substrate preferences, and outcomes of microbiome-directed interventions. Experimental pipelines include synthetic microbial communities, skin microbiome transplants, and quantitative omics to design reproducible manipulations of microbial environments.