A. Delphine Tripp is an American microbiologist who specializes in the fields of phage biology, microbial ecology and evolution, human microbiomes, and skin. Delphine completed her undergraduate studies at UCLA, before joining the Harvard Systems Biology Graduate program as a recipient of the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship. She conducts research on predator-prey interactions in the human skin microbiome in the lab of Tami Lieberman at MIT.
Bacteriophage predation of a dominant commensal in the healthy human skin microbiome
Poor predictability of stable microbial colonization undermines our ability to harness probiotics and phage therapy in human health applications. Person-specific diversity contributes to this unpredictability; it is unclear how microbes colonize and evolve on individuals to create microbiomes with unique compositions, in which most genetic variation occurs within species boundaries. Bacteria-phage dynamics are implicated in promoting microbiome diversity by generating species- and strain-level population fluctuations. Yet, much remains unknown about the assembly and structure of phage populations in human ecosystems, and consequently their role in stable microbial colonization. What role do existing prophage and/or free phage play in the success of new bacterial colonization? How are phage populations structured, and is prophage carriage a source of acquisition? Sebaceous skin offers a tractable model to unravel phage population structure due to its low species-level complexity, ease of temporospatial sampling, and selective conduciveness to colonization at different human developmental stages. Here, we combine a culture-based whole genome sequencing and shotgun metagenomic approach to examine the coevolutionary dynamics of the highly abundant and ubiquitous skin commensal Cutibacterium acnes and its phage.