08-22

Bug Bytes: Bioinformatics for Metagenomics and Microbial Community Analysis

Among many surprising insights, the genomic revolution has helped us to realize that we're never alone and, in fact, barely human. For most of our lives, we share our bodies with some ten times as many microbes as human cells; these are resident in our gut and on nearly every body surface, and they are responsible for a tremendous diversity of metabolic activity, immunomodulation, and intercellular signaling.

These microbial communities have only recently become well-described using high-throughput sequencing, requiring analyses that simultaneously apply techniques from genomics, "big data" mining, and molecular epidemiology. I will discuss emerging end-to-end bioinformatics approaches for metagenomics, including initial handling of sequence data for mixed microbial communities, its reconstruction into metabolic pathways, and biomarker discovery in disease. In particular, computational processing is key in identifying unique markers for microbial taxonomy, phylogeny, and in identifying genes and pathways significantly disrupted in inflammatory conditions such as Crohn's and ulcerative colitis.