Corinne Maurice
Assistant Professor, Department of Microbiology & Immunology
Dr. Maurice is a Tier 1 Canada Research Chair in Gut Microbial Physiology and a CIFAR Azrieli Global Scholar. She has been working with a systems biology approach on microbial communities for over 10 years, in aquatic systems and in the human gut. She pioneered the use of single cell approaches to understand how gut bacteria respond to perturbations and interact with their viral predators (bacteriophages). She demonstrated that common therapeutic drugs can rapidly alter bacterial activity – a possible explanation for different side effects to the same therapeutic treatments. Her collaborative work determined how diet and infection can alter bacterial activity and diversity. At McGill University, her lab is currently taking these approaches further to characterize gut bacterial metabolism, and how to regulate this metabolism with bacteriophages to promote health.
We combine single-cell and metagenomic approaches to study the human gut microbiota and our different research projects explore human health from a microbial standpoint. The overarching research goal is to increase our understanding of the ecological processes and interactions between the different members of the gut microbiota, focusing on bacteria and their specific viruses, called bacteriophages. With this knowledge, we aim to modulate gut microbial communities for improved health after clinically relevant perturbations.
We lead several projects and work collaboratively with other teams on projects that focus on:
(1) characterizing the metabolically active bacterial cells, and
(2) determining how bacteriophages interact with and modulate these bacterial cells in the gut.