Research Areas
Naraporn Somboonna, Associate Professor, Ph.D.
Omics research of interest Microorganisms inhabit almost every ecosystem on earth, and play fundamental roles, either beneficial or detrimental ones. Yet, scientists still have little knowledge on the true diversity of them since a significant proportion of them are undiscovered by traditional nutrient media and conditions. With the advances in next generation sequencing technologies together with my research background in bacteriology, genetics and infectious diseases, I interest in microbiome related with the health of our environments and human bodies. The first part of my research interest is to obtain databases for bacteria, archaea and fungi from diverse environments (marine, coral reefs, sediments and agriculture soils) to establish a complete database that is culture-independent and to better understand the microbial ecosystem. Later, a time-series and/or comparative microbiome analyses are combined to possibly elucidate their effect or relationships with certain factors, e.g. change of microbial diversity after the 2013 oil spill in Samed Island. We also expand our microbiome studies to the distinct niches like the Antarctica to investigate the history of microbiome and their diversity changes over global warming and times, and human bodies (skin and oral cavity) to see their correlated profiles with the health and disease status among Thai populations. The second part of my research is to do a deeper analysis to some of the significant study environments. Examples of the research questions include isolation and whole genome sequencing of unique bacterial species from the Antarctica, and determination of microbial markers for oral health.
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