Daniel Garrido

Daniel obtained his B.Sc. in Molecular Biotechnology, at the University of Chile, in Santiago. He received a Fulbright Scholarship to pursue a Ph.D. in Food Science here at UC Davis, where he is currently in the fourth year. Daniel's previous research experience includes work in wine microbiology, as well as detection methods for probiotics and the impact of prebiotic formulas in the infant gut microbiota.

His research at UC Davis, guided by Dr. David Mills, tries to unravel the genetic determinants that explain the adaptations of Bifidobacterium infantis, an infant gut associated microbe, to consume human milk oligosaccharides and also related host glycans, and other prebiotics. Firstly they have studied and characterized the bacterial transport mechanisms responsible for this phenotype, and their current interest is the study of the bacterial enzymes that can break down this complex substrates. They also focus on the global transcriptomic responses of this probiotic strain to these prebiotics.

More broadly, his interests are the study and application of the molecular aspects of prebiotics, as well as genomic and transcriptomic tools applied to probiotic science, in order to understand better the mechanism of action of probiotic strains as well as to devise more specific prebiotic formulations.