Derrick Fouts is a Professor at the Rockville Campus. Dr. Fouts has extensive experience in viral and bacteriophage genomics, bacterial genomics, comparative genomics, and metagenomics of bacterial and viral communities.

Since joining Dr. Karen Nelson's group at TIGR/JCVI in 2001, Dr. Fouts has led several microbial sequencing projects, including animal, plant and human pathogens. Many of these projects were among the first to compare multiple strains. In addition to leading projects, Dr. Fouts has developed various software tools, including applications to perform multi-genome comparisons and heuristic software (Phage Finder) to identify prophage regions in bacterial genomes. He is currently leading the effort to sequence the human virome and reference viral and bacteriophage genomes as part of the NIH sponsored, Human Microbiome Project.

Dr. Fouts received his B.S. degree (1992) in Biology with honors from Indiana University, Bloomington, and his M.S. (1994) and PhD (1997) degrees in Microbiology from the University of Illinois Urbana/Champaign Department of Microbiology. In 1997, he began postdoctoral work in Dr. Alan Collmer's lab at Cornell University.

GGRaSP

An R-package for selecting representative genomes using Gaussian mixture models.

Phage_Finder

Phage_Finder is a heuristic computer program written in PERL to identify prophage regions within bacterial genomes.

PanACEA

PanACEA is a tool for Pan-Genome visualization, which utilizes locally-computed interactive web-pages to view ordered pan-genome data.

LOCUST

A custom sequence locus typer for classifying microbial genotypic and phenotypic attributes.

Designer Phage

Synthetic Engineering of Bacteriophage for Treatment of Wound Infections

Video

Viral Synthetic Genomics to Engineer Large dsDNA Viruses

Rapid engineering of large dsDNA viruses using synthetic genomics assembly tools.

Genomics, Biomarkers and Mechanisms of Healing in Chronic Wounds

Utilize genomics approaches to identify the microbial composition and functional elements in non-healing and chronic wounds.

Asymptomatic Bacteriuria: Microbiome and Metaproteome

We use genomics approaches to detect the presence of bacteria with known inflammatory responses in asymptomatic patients. 

Vaginal Microbiome Project

A metagenomics approach to understanding the relationship between the vaginal microbiome, bacterial vaginosis, vaginal health and preterm birth.

Mouse Microbiome

Enteric dysbiosis associated with a mouse model of alcoholic liver disease. The translocation of bacteria and bacterial products into the circulation contributes to alcoholic liver disease.

Toby Clarke, MS
Bioinformatics Engineer
Stephanie Mounaud
Scientific Project Manager
Hayley Nordstrom, MS
Staff Scientist
Lily Velazco
Bacteriophage and Antibacterial Resistant Infections
12-Sep-2023
Press Release

J. Craig Venter Institute scientists awarded five-year, $5.7M grant from NIH to develop phage treatment

Phage research accelerates with the rise of antibiotic resistance to address increasingly prevalent and difficult to treat bacterial infections

13-Nov-2019
Press Release

J. Craig Venter Institute and UC San Diego Develop Phage Treatment as Potential Cure for Alcoholic Liver Disease

Team targeted specific toxin-producing strains of the bacterium, Enterococcus faecalis, which is shown to be responsible for most liver damage

09-Jul-2019
Collaborator Release

Combining Antibiotics, Researchers Deliver One-Two Punch against Ubiquitous Bacterium

CWRU/Cleveland VA findings in mouse models could make inroads against superbugs