Yanbin Yin
University of Nebraska-Lincoln, NE·Computer Science
Dietary fiber feeds the bacteria in our gut, and both the amount and the type of fiber shape a healthy gut microbiome. Western diets low in fiber are linked to diseases such as obesity, cardiovascular disease and inflammatory bowel disease (IBD).
- Fields
Computer Science
Microbiology & Immunology
Genetics
- Topics
gut microbiome
glycan utilization
dietary fiber
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Jan 2027
What they work on
- Identify fiber-degrading CAZymes (sugar-digesting enzymes) and CAZyme gene clusters in human gut genomes from HMP, H3Africa and other projects to build the refCAZymes and refCGCs reference databases.
- Develop GLUP, an automated Nextflow bioinformatics workflow that maps an individual's microbiome sequencing reads to the reference databases to infer personal glycan (fiber) utilization.
- Compare glycan utilization abundance and prevalence between inflammatory bowel disease patients and healthy people by mapping metagenomic and metatranscriptomic reads from 791 iHMP-IBDMDB samples.
More about the research
Giving each person the fibers their own gut microbes can use, a form of personalized nutrition, could help prevent disease. To do this, researchers first need computational tools that can read a person's microbiome DNA and predict which fibers it can break down.
Why it matters
Personalized nutrition, which matches dietary fibers to each person's gut microbes, could help prevent metabolic and intestinal diseases such as obesity, cardiovascular disease and inflammatory bowel disease. GLUP and its reference databases could give researchers and the emerging microbiome nutrition industry a way to estimate fiber-digesting capacity from a person's microbiome data. The databases also include African populations that past studies have under-represented.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Xin Li
University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, TX·Microbiology & Immunology·Early-career
Determine how fungal stimulatory RNA (fsRNA), a newly identified fungal RNA, triggers innate immune responses in the intestine, using fungal genetic engineering and long-read RNA sequencing.
Rustem Ismagilov
California Institute of Technology, CA·Microbiology & Immunology
Optimize T-BEAM in germ-free tissue spiked with defined bacteria, targeting over 1,000-fold removal of host nucleic acids while preserving bacterial transcriptional profiles and RNA yield.
David Artis
Weill Medical College of Cornell University, NY·Microbiology & Immunology
Determine which microbiota-derived metabolites induced by a high-fiber diet activate ILC2s (innate immune cells that trigger type 2 responses) and drive eosinophilia and type 2 inflammation that speeds worm expulsion in a mouse helminth model.
The school
University of Nebraska-Lincoln: 17 labs on PI Pages, $657M a year on research, 261 research doctorates a year.
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