Hilary Brown is a PhD student, working in the infection genomics group at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute. In this film he describes how to work safely in the lab with bacteria from the human gut including culturing them on agar plates and extracting the DNA for genome sequencing.
The infection genomics programme uses a variety of different research approaches to study the biology and evolution of disease-causing organisms such as viruses, bacteria and parasites and understand how they cause disease in humans and other animals.