🇬🇧 Computational metagenomics to mine the hidden diversity of the human microbiome

Abstract

Shotgun metagenomics has uncovered a substantial amount of diversity in the human microbiome, but a large fraction of the sequences in a metagenome remains uncharacterized. In my talk I will show how the combination of multiple reference-based and assembly-based computational approaches applied on several thousand of diverse human metagenomes can lead to the discovery of hundreds of previously unknown species and strain-level variants of known species. Cataloging this diversity and exploiting it for large-scale study and be􀆩er characterization of metagenomes is now possible and enables linking previously uncharacterized taxa with host conditions and studying the evolutionary trajectories and person-to-person transmission
of commensal microbes. Mining such hidden human microbiome diversity has also a number of biomedical applications and I will conclude my talk discussing translational initiatives ranging from screening tools for
cancer and other disease, to model and support fecal microbiota transplantation interventions, to novel personalized nutrition approaches.