Below are a selection of research projects that have been completed or paused in our lab.
Chromatographic Analysis of Metabolites
The study of fiber or prebiotic intake and of microbial metabolites require specialized laboratory instruments that allow us to gather data on these variables. The David Lab uses a high-pressure anion-exchange (HPAE) chromatograph, a type of high-performance...
Daily Stool Reports and Health Behavior
Poor diet is the leading risk factor for mortality in the United States. Despite widespread awareness of the benefits of good nutrition, sustained dietary change is difficult to achieve. This is in part because we make decisions about what foods to...
Finding a Standard Approach to Promote Butyrate Production
Prebiotics are dietary carbohydrates that humans are unable to digest and thus pass through the stomach and small intestines to become sources of food for gut microbiota, stimulating the growth of beneficial bacteria in the large intestine. These bacteria...
High-Throughput Culture Using Microfluidics
Prevailing methods of culturing gut bacterial strains are often time- and labor-intensive and do not scale to the diversity of microbes across human populations. An alternative approach, developed in the David Lab, is to culture gut bacteria in nano-...
Long-Term Perturbation Experiments in an Artificial Gut System
A significant barrier to studying perturbations to human gut microbiota is the difficulty of direct sampling from the distal colon over time. Because such sampling is not practicable, the David Lab uses an ex vivo model of the distal colon that consists...
Prebiotic Effects on Human Cognition and Behavior
Beyond gut health, recent studies have shown that butyrate may also be associated with beneficial effects on cognition, behavior, and physiology in rodents and in humans. This communication exchange that occurs between the enteric and the central nervous...