How can we use genes from germs to improve public health?

Ever wondered what infectious disease researchers do with the vast quantities of bacterial DNA that they sequence? Here is an introduction to the work of ‘genome detectives’.

We are a team of researchers based at Oxford University and led by Professor Martin Maiden. We use bacterial DNA sequence to look for targets for new vaccines, understand how bacteria have become resistant to antibiotics, or find ways in which food safety may be improved, for example.