Biography
I am a Research Assistant and part time PhD student in the Pathogen Genomics & Evolution Group, as well as a registered STEM Ambassador.
While studying part time at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine in 2007, I started working in the Sequencing Production team at the Wellcome Sanger Institute. I did my final research project there on the identification of mixed genotype Plasmodium falciparum infections using the newly developed Illumina sequencing platform, under the supervision of Professor Dominic Kwiatkowski.
In 2008 I took a Research Assistant position with Professor Julian Parkhill on the Pathogen Genomics team, where I went on to focus on novel capsule biosynthesis genes in Streptococcus pneumoniae, and the human microbiota. I joined the Department of Veterinary Medicine in 2019.
Research
My main research interests are: the respiratory tract microbiome, the novel bacterium Ornithobacterium hominis, and the identification, mitigation, and prevention of DNA contamination in low biomass microbiome studies.
Publications
'Candidatus Ornithobacterium hominis': insights gained from draft genomes obtained from nasopharyngeal swabs (2019) Salter SJ, Scott P, Page AJ, Tracey A, de Goffau MC, Cormie C, Ochoa-Montaño B, Ling CL, Tangmanakit J, Turner P, Parkhill J. Microb Genom, 5(2). doi: 10.1099/mgen.0.000247
A longitudinal study of the infant nasopharyngeal microbiota: The effects of age, illness and antibiotic use in a cohort of South East Asian children (2017) Salter SJ, Turner C, Watthanaworawit W, de Goffau MC, Wagner J, Parkhill J, Bentley SD, Goldblatt D, Nosten F, Turner P. PLoS Negl Trop Dis, 11(10):e0005975. doi: 10.1371/journal.pntd.0005975
Reagent and laboratory contamination can critically impact sequence-based microbiome analyses (2014) Salter SJ, Cox MJ, Turek EM, Calus ST, Cookson WO, Moffatt MF, Turner P, Parkhill J, Loman NJ, Walker AW. BMC Biol, 12:87. doi: 10.1186/s12915-014-0087-z
Variation at the capsule locus, cps, of mistyped and non-typable Streptococcus pneumoniae isolates (2012) Salter SJ, Hinds J, Gould KA, Lambertsen L, Hanage WP, Antonio M, Turner P, Hermans PWM, Bootsma HJ, O'Brien KL, Bentley SD. Microbiology, 158(6):1560-1569. doi: 10.1099/mic.0.056580-0
2022-2023
Dr Felix Dube, University of Cape Town, South Africa.
"The interactions of Ornithobacterium hominis with respiratory pathogens in South Africa" supported by the Cambridge-Africa ALBORADA Research Fund.
