We are exposed to hundreds - if not thousands - of various small molecule chemicals through our food. These include therapeutic drugs but also chemical pollutants such as pesticides and industrial chemicals that make their way into food systems. I will discuss interactions between these xenobiotics with our gut microbiome, which sits at the interface of environment and our vital organs, mechanistic basis of these interactions, and potential routes to detoxification.
Kiran studied Chemical Engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology (Mumbai, India). Following his PhD in Systems Biology at the Technical University of Denmark (DTU), Kiran was appointed as Assistant Professor at DTU where he worked on transcriptional regulation and metabolic engineering. In 2010, Kiran joined the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (Heidelberg, Germany) as a Group Leader. He moved to the MRC Toxicology Unit (University of Cambridge) in 2019 and was appointed Professor of Molecular Systems Biology in Dept. Biochemistry in 2022. His lab develops tools and model systems to decipher microbial interactions.