Professor Christoph Tang’s group is based at the Sir William Dunn School of Pathology at the University of Oxford. The group studies the human adapted pathogens, Neisseria meningitidis, Neisseria gonorrhoeae, and Shigella spp.. We are interested in how these important pathogens survive in their host and interact other members of the microbiome. We also invesitgate the mechanisms underlying the maintenance of plasmids, as they can confer virulence and antimicrobial resistance in these bacteria.

Our aim is to understand the basis of host:pathogen interactions and how bacteria have evolved to exploit specific niches during colonisation and disease, and co-exist within bacterial communities. We seek to apply this knowledge to prevent infection through the development of vaccines and therapeutics.

The Maiden Lab currently holds a collaborative research grant with Chris, funded by the Wellcome Trust, and titled 'Gonococcal vaccine initiative'.

Matthew Snape, MBBS FRCPCH MD, is an Associate Professor in General Paediatrics and Vaccinology at the Oxford Vaccine Group, University of Oxford Department of Paediatrics and the NIHR Oxford Biomedical Research Council.  He is also a Jenner Investigator and works as a General Paediatrician at the Children’s Hospital Oxford, Oxford University Hospitals NHS Trust.

The Maiden Lab currently holds a collaborative policy research programme grant with Matthew funded by the Department of Health and Social Care, titled 'Evaluating the effect of “MenB” vaccination on meningococcal carriage'. 

I am a student at the RVC assessing the level, dose and timings of AMDs administered to chickens and, by incorporating mathematical models, simulating their effects on gut microbial dynamics and the presence of resistance genes. I graduated in BSc Zoology from the University of Exeter, where I also obtained a Masters by Research with a focus on the population genetics of bumblebee species. My research project looked into the effects of agri-environment schemes and island/mainland sites on the population structure and stability of common species of bumblebees. I then continued within academia as a research assistant in the Maiden lab group at Oxford University working with the bacteria Campylobacter through the food chain from farm to human clinical disease.

I am Professor and director of Bioinformatics (Milner Centre for Evolution) at the University of Bath and Co-PI of MRC CLIMB (Cloud Infrastructure for Microbial Bioinformatics)–the UKs largest cloud-based system for the analysis of microbial genomes.

Research in my group centres on the use of genetics/genomics and phenotypic studies to address complex questions in the ecology, epidemiology and evolution of microbes.

Our most recent interests focus upon comparative genome analyses to describe the core and flexible genome of pathogenic bacteria (Campylobacter, Staphylococcus, Helicobacter and Escherichia coli) and how this is related to population genetic structuring, the maintenance of species, and the evolution of host/niche adaptation and virulence.

I came to Oxford in 2007. Here I completed the undergraduate Biological Science course run jointly by the Zoology and Plant Sciences departments and began my DPhil with the Maiden group in October 2013, and graduated in 2017. 

Kate is a senior scientist (molecular biology) working with the MMM team. Her current research focus is the development of molecular methods exploiting whole genome sequencing for the rapid diagnosis of Mycobacteria infections. She is also investigating the role of antimicrobial resistance in the emergence of Clostridium difficile infecting humans. 

Working as a researcher at Health Protection Surveillance Centre, Dublin, Ireland since 2020.

Profile

Martin Maiden has more than thirty years of experience in the NHS and academia, translating high-quality basic science into practical public health benefits, especially in bacterial vaccines, vaccination, and food safety. This has included leading/participating in large national and international studies to understand the impact of vaccines and the development of widely-adopted approaches and bioinformatics platforms for exploiting sequence-based and genomic data.  He also has more than fifteen years’ experience as an undergraduate and graduate educator and in advanced training for health professionals and capacity building, especially in Europe and Africa.

Biography

I have wanted to work in science for a long as I can remember, with my interest in infectious disease stemming from my time in the sixth form (High School) when I read MacFarlane Burnett’s seminal book ‘The Natural History of Infectious Disease’.  I took a microbiology degree at Reading when Colin Kaplan was Head of the Department, cementing my interest in infectious disease biology, vaccination, and disease prevention and control.   I moved to undertake a PhD with Peter Henderson in Hans Kornberg’s Laboratory in the Biochemistry Department in Cambridge, learning to apply molecular genetic approaches to biochemical problems.  Here, working with Steve Baldwin, we discovered the Major Facilitator Superfamily, which includes both human and bacterial transport proteins. 

After an MCR training Fellowship in Cambridge, Geoffrey Schild, the director of the National Institute for Biological Standards and Control (then part of the NHS), offered me the opportunity of starting an independent research group.  At NIBSC, I aimed to combine the latest molecular approaches with the evolutionary biology and natural history of pathogens to combatting infectious diseases.  Working closely with Ian Feavers, we established group working on meningococcal vaccine antigenic variation using sequence methods.  We recognised the importance of population and evolutionary approaches and, after a sabbatical year in Berlin with Mark Achtman, in 1997 I moved with Brian Spratt to the Zoology Department in Oxford, as a Wellcome Trust Senior Fellow.  At Oxford I have developed the evolutionary and epidemiological aspects of the work with many collaborators including Eddie Holmes and Sunetra Gupta. 

At the turn of the century we developed multilocus sequence typing (MLST), an influential tool for the practical population and evolutionary biology of pathogens.  We applied this approach to both epidemiological investigations and the UK Meningococcal Carriage Group (UKMenCar) studies of the impact of the meningococcal serogroup C conjugate vaccines in the UK, in which we established the importance of herd immunity in the success of these vaccines.  MLST also helped us to untangle the complex epidemiology and biology of Campylobacter, which coincidentally my undergraduate tutor Bob Park had played a role in defining as a major public health problem.  The insights from UKMenCar were influential in the introduction of the serogroup A conjugate vaccine MenAfriVac®, and working in the MenAfriCar consortium with Brian Greenwood, we were able to observe a similar herd immunity effect in the African Meningitis Belt.  We also worked with Andy Pollard onmeningococal vaccine development.

During the early 2000s, Developments in next generation sequencing made possible a truly ‘population genomics’ approach to studying bacterial diseases.  In 2010 Keith Jolley and I published the Bacterial Isolate Genome Database System (BIGSdb), which enabled the widely-used https://PubMLST.org website to handle whole genome sequences permitting whole genome studies at the population level including ‘population annotation’, annotating and cataloging all genes in a population.  The PubMLST site now hosts data from >800,000 bacterial isolates more than 550,000 of them having genome data. 

Our ‘gene-by-gene’ population genomics approach was used in the development of the Meningitis Research Foundation Meningococci Genome Library, a collaboration with Ray Borrow at Public Health England, Chris Tang in Oxford, and Julian Parkhill at the Sanger Institute.  Working with PHE, we have helped the application of genomics to real-world problems in real time, including contributing to the decision to implement the MenACYW conjugate vaccine into the UK in 2015.  We have on-going studies the population effects of meningococcal vaccines and how social behavior affects the spread of meningococci.

 With a large group of international collaborators, we continue to develop new methods for the application of molecular data to the prevention of infectious disease, combining this with extensive training at the undergraduate, graduate and professional levels.

Harvard University page