Colloquium Details
High-specificity Methods For Profiling Microbial Communities and the Human Microbiome
| Author: | Dr. Curtis Huttenhower Harvard University |
|---|---|
| Date: | December 04, 2014 |
| Time: | 15:30 |
| Location: | 220 Deschutes |
Abstract
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. High-throughput sequencing has only recently provided a tool that allows exploration of microbial function, microbe-microbe, and host-microbe interactions in these complex and highly diverse ecologies.
Computational methods for interpreting metagenomic sequencing typically rely on the catalog of thousands of available microbial reference genomes. I will describe a series of bioinformatic approaches for interpreting microbial community sequences using these genomic resources, specifically the PhlAn tools for Phylogenetic Analysis. These provide efficient algorithms for taxonomic profiling within communities - identifying which organisms are present - for phylogenetic reconstruction and placement of new genomes, and for functional profiling and metabolic pathway reconstruction. I will further describe an application of these tools for strain tracking in microbial communities, resulting in the ability to uniquely identify individual human hosts using metagenomic codes.
Biography
Dr. Curtis Huttenhower is an Associate Professor in Biostatistics at the Harvard School of Public Health and an Associate Member at the Broad Institute. He participated extensively in the NIH Human Microbiome Project and co-leads the "HMP2" Center for Characterizing the gut microbial ecosystem in IBD. His lab focuses on computational methods for functional analysis of microbial communities. This includes systems biology reconstructions integrating metagenomic, metatranscriptomic, and other microbial community 'omics, the human microbiome in autoimmune disease such as IBD, and its potential as a diagnostic tool and point of therapeutic intervention.