Laura Carroll is one of just 16 researchers selected from 213 applicants to receive Sweden’s prestigious Future Research Leaders award which provides SEK 15 million over five years along with leadership training to support emerging scientific leaders.

I’m really excited I’ve never had formal leadership training before so I’m eager to gain new ideas techniques and skills says Laura Carroll Assistant Professor in the Department of Clinical Microbiology and a fellow in SciLifeLab’s Data Driven Life Science (DDLS) program.

Her project Maximising microbiome resolution with single-cell genomics focuses on developing techniques that allow microbiologists to sequence the genome of every individual cell within a microbiome. This will help identify which species and strains are present and which genes they carry with unmatched precision.

This is a key question in microbiome research but answering it is very difficult as current methods lack either the necessary resolution or throughput Carroll explains.

To address this Carroll’s team in collaboration with researchers at Umeå University including Johan Henriksson’s group recently developed a new method capable of generating up to a million bacterial genomes from a single sample. This breakthrough offers unprecedented resolution and could revolutionize how microbiomes are analyzed.

With support from SSF we’re now able to take our method to the next level by developing new computational tools to handle and interpret these massive datasets Carroll says.

She hopes that the techniques developed through this project will provide microbiologists with unprecedented insights into microbiomes potentially improving infectious disease treatment and monitoring and paving the way for new microbiome-based diagnostics and therapeutics.

This grant couldn’t have come at a better time she adds. Until now we’ve made great progress by combining our resources but to truly advance this work we need to grow. The SSF funding will allow us to expand our team and further develop our methods.

Carroll also credits the highly collaborative environment at Umeå University as a driving force behind the project’s success: I really value how collaborative the researchers here are. I’ve never worked in such a welcoming and cooperative setting it’s this spirit that makes innovative research like this possible.

Source: https://www.umu.se/en/news/laura-carroll-awarded-future-research-leader-grant--receives-15-million-sek-to-resolve-the-microbiome-of-cells_12115356/