Dr. Hooman DERAKHSHANI

BIOGRAPHY
I received a DVM degree from University of Tehran, Iran (2005), M.Sc. in Animal Nutrition form the University of Queensland, Australia (2011), and Ph.D. in Livestock Microbiome from the University of Manitoba, Canada (2018). After completion of my PhD, I received a NSERC postdoctoral fellowship to expand my research in the field of translational microbiome research at McMaster University, Canada where I worked extensively on culturomics of the microbiome of humans and animals. My current position as an Assistant Professor at the University of Manitoba focuses on revealing the therapeutic potentials of the microbiome to improve health and performance of livestock.
Company
University of Manitoba
Country

Canada 🇨🇦 

Presentation

Chinese version 🇨🇳

Spanish version 🇪🇸

Portuguese version 🇵🇹

Application of culturomics for revealing the therapeutic potentials of livestock microbiota

One of the main mechanisms through which commensal microbiota interact with their host and competing microorganisms is through production of specialized secondary metabolites, also known as microbial natural products (MNPs).

Having evolved within host-associated microbial ecosystems, MNPs produced by commensal bacteria often have immunomodulatory and antimicrobial activities, and therefore represent attractive therapeutic targets.

Despite mounting genomic and metagenomic evidence regarding the diversity and contribution of MNPs to health and disease resilience of humans and animals, the therapeutic potentials of these natural resources remain largely untapped.

This is mainly due to the unavailability of comprehensive isolate collections that represent phylogenetic and strain diversity of microbiotas in their natural ecosystems. In this presentation, we will review our recent efforts to generate extensive strain collections, genome catalogues, and MNP libraries specific to the microbiota of different species of farm animals.

Our goal is to identify novel microbiota-derived therapeutics for enhancing gut health, disease resilience and production performance of economically important species of farms animals.