Chrysi Sergaki
Interim Head of the Microbiome Section, Division of Bacteriology at NIBSC/MHRA
Dr Chrysi Sergaki is a scientist in the Microbiome section at the National Institute for Biological Standards and Control (NIBSC), working on microbial interactions and how to utilise them for the benefit of human health.
At NIBSC, Chrysi is leading projects investigating the role of the microbiome in gut health and disease. Furthermore, she is leading the development of reference reagents that can act as global standards and will be evaluated as candidates for the first World Health Organization Whole Cell Reference Reagents for the microbiome. This project aims to set light to the bias introduced by the DNA extraction process in microbiome research. Chrysi is also leading a global WHO collaborative study for the establishment of the first World Health Organization DNA Reference Reagents for NGS analysis of microbiome samples.
Before joining the NIBSC in 2019, Chrysi completed her PhD at the University of Warwick, UK, researching microbial interactions in fungi and bacteria and their impact on the host by combining laboratory and bioinformatics approaches.
Title: Developing global standards for the microbiome field
- The microbiome field lacks effective standardisation of methodologies to analyse the human microbiome
- We developed DNA reference reagents for the standardisation of the NGS analysis of microbiome samples (NIBSC-DNA-RR) and Whole Cell reference reagents for the standardisation of the DNA extraction of microbiome samples (NIBSC-WC-RR)
- These reagents can act as global working standards and will be evaluated as candidate World Health Organization international reference reagents for NGS analysis and DNA extraction of microbiome samples