Dr. Thomas Sharpton’s research is broadly directed towards ascertaining how commensal microbiota and their genomic characteristics (i.e., the microbiome) relate to health. His laboratory specializes in the development and application of high-throughput computational and statistical tools that characterize microbiome biology, and investigates how microbiomes are distributed across space, time, and host physiology. The Sharpton lab aims to develop testable hypotheses about how hosts and their microbiome interact, and strives to understand the evolutionary and ecological processes that influence community assembly, maintenance, and function within a host. Ultimately, this knowledge will be used to discover disease mechanisms, identify predicative and diagnostic biomarkers of disease, and develop tools to treat disease through manipulation of the microbiome. All of the data resources and software that his lab develops are freely available.
Current research in the Sharpton lab includes the development of bioinformatics tools that improve the analysis of microbiome function, investigations into the relationship between gut microbiome diversity and inflammatory bowel disease, and characterization of the composition of the oral microbiome associated with ancient human populations (e.g., the Khoesan) to ascertain how humans and their microbiomes have coevolved.
