Research

Anna’s main research interest is in understanding the interactions within microbial communities and with their hosts. This research holds potential to explain the basis of diseases in humans, animals, and plants, to predict responses to environmental and lifestyle change, and to deliver innovative approaches for improving and maintaining quality of life. Microbiome research is an area where different experts meet, including microbiologists, ecologist, medical researchers, soil scientists, plant scientists, biotechnologists, bioinformaticians, biostatisticians, data scientists, and modelers. Anna’s research of is positioned at the interface of bioinformatics, data science, microbial ecology and physiology. Development and improvement of meta-omics bioinformatics and data analysis methods are central, as is the integration of different microbiome and host or environment data. The applications can be divided into three fields:
(i) plant-microbe interactions and soil microbiome: current examples include PhD projects on both pathogenic (https://www.metabolismlab.org/team-member/sjors-huizinga/) and mycorrhizal (https://the-jena-experiment.de/index.php/mycorrhiza/) fungi, as well as cross-kingdom microbial interactions (https://the-jena-experiment.de/index.php/database-synthesis/).
(ii) human microbiome: a focus is on the role of gut and oral microbiomes in health and disease (https://pmh-uva.nl/workpackage-2-optimization-of-the-data-collection-and-data-handling-infrastructure-for-microbiomics/).
(iii) wastewater treatment, trans-environmental microbiome research, and one-health: a current project is MicroHealth (https://www.microhealth.nl/en, financed by a NWO KIC grant) on the connection between the impact of agriculture on the soil and plant quality/microbiome and the consequences for the health of humans. Anna is also involved in the Holomicrobiome Initiative (https://holomicrobioom.nl/nl/home/) and Institute (https://holomicrobioom.nl/nl/holomicrobioom-instituut/).