Keith Dufault-Thompson

Staff Scientist since 2021

Research areas

  • Microbial metabolism
  • Host-microbiome interactions
  • Bioinformatics Software Development

Education

  • BS: Clemson University, Microbiology (Biomedicine), (2013)
  • PhD: University of Rhode Island, Cell and Molecular Biology, (2020)
Keith Dufault-Thompson

Background

My name is Keith Dufault-Thompson and I am a Staff Scientist at the National Institutes of Health studying microbial genomics in Dr. Xiaofang Jiang’s research group. I am interested understanding how microbes interact with other organisms, especially through the context of microbial metabolism. My current work involves investigating health relevant microbial metabolic pathways in the human microbiome using comparative genomics approaches and analyses of large scale public datasets. My research also involves the development of new bioinformatics tools and pipelines to aide in the analysis of microbial genomic data. In addition to research I am passionate about scientific outreach and education, and have been actively involved in outreach activities throughout graduate school and my postdoctoral career.

Papers from time in Jiang lab

  1. Yang Y, Dufault-Thompson K, Fontenele RS, Jiang X. 2022. Putative Host-Derived Insertions in the Genomes of Circulating SARS-CoV-2 Variants. mSystem. DOI: 10.1128/msystems.00179-22.
  2. Dufault-Thompson K, Jiang X. 2022. Applications of de Bruijn Graphs in Microbiome Research. iMeta. 1: e4. DOI: 10.1002/imt2.4.
  3. Dufault-Thompson K, Hall AB, Jiang X. 2022. Taxonomic Distribution and Evolutionary Analysis of the Equol Biosynthesis Gene Cluster. BMC Genomics. 23: 1. DOI: 10.1186/s12864-022-08426-7.
  4. Fontenele RS, Yang Y, Driver EM, Magge A, Kraberger S, Custer JM, Dufault-Thompson K, Cox E, Newell ME, Varsani A, Halden RU, Scotch M, Jiang X. 2023. Wastewater surveillance uncovers regional diversity and dynamics of SARS-CoV-2 variants across nine states in the USA. Sci Total Environ.. 877: 162862. DOI: 10.1016/j.scitotenv.2023.162862.
  5. Hall B, Levy S, Dufault-Thompson K, Arp G, Zhong A, Ndjite GM, Weiss A, Braccia D, Jenkins C, Yang Y, Arp G, Abeysinghe S, Jermain M, Wu CH, Jiang X. 2024. BilR is a gut microbial enzyme that reduces bilirubin to urobilinogen. Nature Microbiology. 9: 173-184. DOI: 10.1038/s41564-023-01549-x.
  6. Yang Y, Dufault-Thompson K, Yan W, Cai T, Xie L, Jiang X. 2024. Large-scale genomic survey with deep learning-based method reveals strain-level phage specificity determinants. GigaScience. 13: . DOI: 10.1093/gigascience/giae017.
  7. Arp G, Jiang A, Dufault-Thompson K, Levy S, Zhong A, Wassan JT, Grant M, Li Y, Hall B, Jiang X. 2024. Gut Bacteria Encode Reductases that Biotransform Steroid Hormones. bioRxiv. DOI: 10.1101/2024.10.04.616736.
  8. Burnim A, Dufault-Thompson K, Jiang X. 2024. The three-sided right-handed β-helix is a versatile fold for glycan interactions. Glycobiology. 26: cwaw\e037. DOI: 10.1093/glycob/cwae037.
  9. Jacoby C, Scorza K, Ecker L, McMillin M, Ramaswamy R, Sundararajan A, Sidebottom AM, Lin H, Dufault-Thompson K, Hall B, Jiang X, Light SH. 2024. Gut Bacteria Metabolize Natural and Synthetic Steroid Hormones via the Reductive OsrABC Pathway. bioRxiv. DOI: 10.1101/2024.10.08.617280.
  10. Dufault-Thompson K, Jiang X. 2024. Annotating microbial functions with ProkFunFind. mSystems. 19: e0003624. DOI: 10.1128/msystems.00036-24.
  11. 1. Dufault-Thompson K, Levy S, Hall B, Jiang X. 2025. Bilirubin reductase shows host-specific associations in animal large intestines. The ISME Journal. S0168-9525: 00296-8. DOI: 10.1093/ismejo/wrae242.