Prof. Jeroen Raes (m) is professor at KU Leuven since 2013 and VIB group leader since 2009. His group currently consists of 27 scientists, with expertise in bioinformatics, systems biology, clinical research and microbiology. He has a substantial track record in microbiome research and has been pioneering the analysis and integration of meta-omics datasets (metagenomics, metatranscriptomics, metaproteomics, meta-metabolomics) with environmental, clinical, host omics and dietary data. He was involved in the FP7 MetaHIT and NIH Human Microbiome Project (the latter as only European partner), which laid the foundations for the human microbiome field as it is today. Finally, his lab is performing a wide range of disease-related projects in a.o. IDB, diabetes, cancer, IBS and antibiotics resistance on national (FWO/IWT) funding and develops novel approaches and tools for microbiome research. Jeroen Raes coordinates the Flemish Gut Flora project, a large scale microbiome- focused population cohort in Belgium.

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Keynote Details

Wednesday 1 July

Symposium 21: Microbiome and health

Quantitative Microbiome Profiling (QMP) in health and disease

Alterations in the gut microbiota have been linked to various pathologies, ranging from inflammatory bowel diseases and diabetes to cancer.

Although large numbers of clinical studies aiming at microbiome-based disease markers are currently being performed, our basic knowledge about the normal variability of the human intestinal microbiota and its determining factors remains limited. Here, I will discuss our findings studying a large-scale study (Flemish Gut Flora Project; n=3400) of the gut microbiome variation in a geographically confined region (Flanders, Belgium), in which analysis of microbiome variability in health identified the primary parameters associated to microbiome composition. In this presentation, I will discuss our experiences in large-scale microbiome monitoring, show how the development of dedicated computational approaches can assist in microbiome analysis and interpretation, and which confounders are essential for inclusion in microbiome disease research.

In addition, I will show how Quantitative Microbiome Profiling (QMP; Vandeputte et al. Nature 2017), which combines microbiomics with flow cytometry-based cell counts, is profoundly changing our view on gut microbiota variation and allowed the identification of an inflammation-associated, cross-disease enterotype. Leads from such QMP-based profiling are enabling the development of microbiome modulation strategies.