Os Programas de Pós-Graduação em Bioinformática, Bioquímica e Genética convidam para o Seminário:

“Patterns in metagenomic data from diverse biomes and computational challenges in analyzing microbial communities”

Apresentação:
Profa. Dra. Alice Rebecca Wattam
Pesquisadora do Biocomplexity Institute of Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, VA, Estados Unidos.

Data: 16 de Setembro (sexta-feira)
Horário: 14h
Local: Auditório 3 “Professora Maria Cristina Lima de Castro”, ICB/UFMG

Resumo: Microbes constitute about a third of the Earth's biomass and exhibit remarkable genetic diversity. In a majority of environments, microbes live as interacting communities. Common questions by those that study these environments involve species diversity and what those species are doing, but the level of detail that can be achieved depends upon the biome under examination. We describe the steps taken to analyze two very different kinds of samples: from clinical patients versus from natural soil habitats. Because of lower diversity and developed reference databases, human microbiome samples can be analyzed in detail. We present an example where de novo assembly of a pathogen’s genome was possible in a clinical microbiome sample. In contrast, soil communities are so diverse and not represented well in reference databases that the conclusions we can draw are far less granular and limited to cataloging similarities and differences across biomes. Part of our ongoing effort is to analysis pipelines and sufficient computational power to make it easier for research biologists to perform sophisticated analyses.