MSI PI Dan Knights (assistant professor, Department of Computer Science and Engineering; Biotechnology Institute) is a co-author on a recent study by researchers at the U of M and Nantes University Hospital in France that found that gut bacteria may be predictors of the risk of infection following chemotherapy. This is an early study, but the results are promising as a method to help reduce the possibility that cancer patients will get a serious infection. An article about the research appears on the College of Science and Engineering website.
Professor Knights uses MSI resources to support his work in computational microbiology. His work has been featured in stories on the MSI website: The Fungal Microbiome in Infants (April 2015) and Changes in the Human Gut Microbiome Caused by Colorectal Cancer (September 2015).