The College of Life Sciences (CLS) at University of Dundee (UoD) is one of the largest and most productive research institutes in Europe with more than 1000 staff and research students and external funding in excess of £30 million per year. Research activities at the University are divided into eight different Divisions including Molecular Medicine and Molecular Microbiology. These Divisions house multidisciplinary research in which biologists, chemists, economists and jurists develop new strategies to tackle major health and environmental issues.

The group at UoD has over fifteen years of experience in the deployment of “OMICS” technologies for the understanding of bacterial pathogenesis and microbe-host interactions with over 95 publications (h factor = 33) in refereed international scientific publications. The research laboratories are located in the Molecular Microbiology Division and Medical School at UoD and are equipped for all of the techniques necessary for the proposed research. The major focus of the group’s work has been investigating the impact of the microbiome of the lungs of patients with CF and other chronic lung diseases, using a combination of microbiologic culture-based studies and next-generation sequencing based metagenomic and metatranscriptomic approaches. In particular, the group has targeted the role that inter- and intra-species signalling plays in polymicrobial pulmonary infection, and how such processes affect antibiotic treatment and resistance. These are key areas of research in the CFMATTERS project and one that this group is best placed to address.