Computational challenges in microbiome research

Summary form only given. Millions of bacteria make our bodies their home. They help keep us healthy, and disruptions in the normal microbiota are believed to contribute to a number of diseases. Cost-effective sequencing technologies have made it possible to sequence the genomes of human-associated microbial communities, leading to the birth of a new scientific discipline - metagenomics. Analyzing the resulting data, however, poses significant computational challenges, in part due to the sheer size of the data-sets, and in part due to the fact that most of the existing computational framework has been established for single organisms. In my talk I will outline several analytical challenges posed by metagenomic applications, and will describe recent results from my lab in the development of tools for analyzing metagenomic data. In particular I will discuss insights from our analysis of diarrheal disease in developing countries, as well as the effective use of co-abundance approaches for linking together data from two large metagenomic studies.