In the Kauffman lab, our focus is on understanding how viruses that infect bacteria interact with their hosts, and how these interactions shape the ecological, evolutionary, and functional properties of bacteria and microbial communities. These viruses that infect bacteria are called bacteriophages, or phages. We use cultivation- and sequencing-based approaches to study phages in the context of microbial communities, with the aim of uncovering the molecular underpinnings of microbial system-level properties.
Phages in the oral microbiome: Determining the structure of phage-bacteria interactions in microbial communities in the human oral microbiome, and how and why these differ in health and disease.