Garret Suen

About

Garret Suen is a Professor of Bacteriology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and holds the Alfred Toepfer Faculty Fellowship. His research focuses on microbial ecology, rumen microbiology, metagenomics, and biofuels. He is involved in studying the effects of rumen to blood pathways on early lactation performance in transition dairy cows, microbial dynamics following dietary interventions in cattle, and the microbiota of wooden cheese-ripening boards as a source of antimicrobial-producing bacteria. His work also includes investigating host-microbiome mutualism during hibernation, the impact of dietary supplements on microbiota composition, and the microbiome's role in disease and health in various animals, including dairy cows, horses, and humans. Suen's research contributes to understanding microbial communities' disturbance-diversity relationships, zoonotic pathogen carriage, and microbiome responses to environmental and physiological factors, advancing knowledge in microbiology, veterinary science, and agricultural health.

Research topics

• Biology
• Genetics
• Computer Science
• Microbiology
• Computational biology
• Evolutionary biology
• Animal science
• Endocrinology
• Medicine
• Immunology

Selected publications

• A genomic catalog of Earth’s microbiomes

  Nature Biotechnology · 2020 · 963 citations

  The reconstruction of bacterial and archaeal genomes from shotgun metagenomes has enabled insights into the ecology and evolution of environmental and host-associated microbiomes. Here we applied this approach to >10,000 metagenomes collected from diverse habitats covering all of Earth's continents and oceans, including metagenomes from human and animal hosts, engineered environments, and natural and agricultural soils, to capture extant microbial, metabolic and functional potential. This compre…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• A collection of bacterial isolates from the pig intestine reveals functional and taxonomic diversity

  Nature Communications · 2020 · 216 citations

  Our knowledge about the gut microbiota of pigs is still scarce, despite the importance of these animals for biomedical research and agriculture. Here, we present a collection of cultured bacteria from the pig gut, including 110 species across 40 families and nine phyla. We provide taxonomic descriptions for 22 novel species and 16 genera. Meta-analysis of 16S rRNA amplicon sequence data and metagenome-assembled genomes reveal prevalent and pig-specific species within Lactobacillus, Streptococcus…

  DOI

• Multiomics analysis reveals the presence of a microbiome in the gut of fetal lambs

  Gut · 2021 · 102 citations

  OBJECTIVE: Microbial exposure is critical to neonatal and infant development, growth and immunity. However, whether a microbiome is present in the fetal gut prior to birth remains debated. In this study, lambs delivered by aseptic hysterectomy at full term were used as an animal model to investigate the presence of a microbiome in the prenatal gut using a multiomics approach. DESIGN: Lambs were euthanised immediately after aseptic caesarean section and their cecal content and umbilical cord bloo…

  DOI

• Quantification of antimicrobial usage in adult cows and preweaned calves on 40 large Wisconsin dairy farms using dose-based and mass-based metrics

  Journal of Dairy Science · 2021 · 61 citations

  Use of antimicrobials in animal agriculture is under increasing scrutiny, but the quantity of antimicrobials used on large US dairy farms has not been evaluated using data from large farms and different metrics. This study investigated total antimicrobial usage (AMU) in adult dairy cows and preweaned calves (PWC) and contrasted 2 metrics used for measurement of AMU. Wisconsin dairy farms were eligible if they had >250 lactating cows, maintained computerized animal health records, and were willin…

  DOI

• Incidence and Treatments of Bovine Mastitis and Other Diseases on 37 Dairy Farms in Wisconsin

  Pathogens · 2022 · 39 citations

  The aim of this research was to describe the incidence and treatments of mastitis and other common bovine diseases using one year of retrospective observational data (n = 50,329 cow-lactations) obtained from herd management software of 37 large dairy farms in Wisconsin. Incidence rate (IR) was defined as the number of first cases of each disease divided by the number of lactations per farm. Clinical mastitis (CM) remains the most diagnosed disease of dairy cows. Across all herds, the mean IR (ca…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Cameron R. Currie

  University of Wisconsin–Madison

  92 shared

• Paul J. Weimer

  University of Wisconsin–Madison

  61 shared

• Nasia Safdar

  University of Wisconsin–Madison

  38 shared

• Jarrod J. Scott

  Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute

  36 shared

• Ashley E. Kates

  William S. Middleton Memorial Veterans Hospital

  31 shared

• Frank O. Aylward

  Virginia Tech

  29 shared

• Lynne Goodwin

  Los Alamos National Laboratory

  29 shared

• Andrew J. Steinberger

  University of Wisconsin–Madison

  25 shared

Labs

• Suen LabPI

Education

• Ph.D. Biology, Biology

  Syracuse University

  2008

• M. Sc. Computer Sciences

  University of Calgary

  2004

• B. Sc. Computer Sciences

  University of Calgary

  2002

• B.Sc. Biological Sciences

  University of Calgary

  2000

Awards & honors

• Alfred Toepfer Faculty Fellow

Similar researchers at University of Wisconsin-Madison

• Robert Landickh-93
• Thomas Jeffriesh-77