Johnston Laboratory

Welcome to the Johnston Lab! We focus on genetics and epigenetics of bacteria that are found to invade and colonize human tumors, predominantly in cancers of the gastrointestinal tract. Using cutting edge technologies and methodologies, we seek to gain a deeper functional understanding of what these bacteria are doing and how they are doing it. Our goal is to use that information to create novel therapeutics and engineer the next generation of microbe-based technologies for application in human medicine, synthetic biology and bioengineering. We also aim to apply synthetic biology approaches to understand and engineer the human microbiota.