Research in the Bushman laboratory focuses on host-microbe interactions in health and disease, with particular focus on studies of 1) the human microbiome, 2) HIV pathogenesis, and 3) DNA integration in human gene therapy.
In recent years, our work has been driven increasingly by the remarkable new deep sequencing methods, which can produce more than 100 billion bases of DNA sequence information in a single instrument run.
For microbiome studies, this allows comprehensive analyze of microbial populations without reliance on culture-based methods, which can detect only a small fraction of all organisms present.
For studies of HIV replication, this allows analysis of complex viral populations or distributions of retroviral DNA integration sites in the human genome.
For gene therapy, this allows tracking of integrated vectors in gene-corrected subjects and molecular characterization of adverse events. Sample acquisition can sometimes be difficult in such projects, but bioinformatic analysis afterwards is almost always harder. We have been carrying out this type of study since 2002, when we showed that HIV DNA integration in human cells was favored in active transcription units, and over the years have built up partially automated software pipelines that allow efficient analysis deep sequencing data.
Lab members and collaborators cover a range of specialties, including clinical researchers, molecular biologists, computational biologists, and statisticians.