Tuesday, 13 February 2018 | 12:00 noon
Bioinformatics Group, Department of Molecular Biology, Division of Biology, Faculty of Science, Zagreb, CROATIA
Functional profiling of microbial communities through translational optimization
(Host: L. Banks)
Metagenomics projects use next generation sequencing to unravel genetic potential in microbial communities from a wealth of environmental niches, including those associated with human body and relevant to human health.In order to understand large data sets collected in metagenomics surveys and interpret them in context of how a community metabolism as a whole adapts and interacts with the environment,it is necessary to extend beyond the conventional approaches of decomposing metagenomes into microbial species’ constituents and performing analysis on separate components.
By applying concepts of translational optimisation through codon usage adaptation on entire metagenomic data sets, we demonstrate that a bias in codon usage present throughout the entire microbial community can be used as a powerful analytical tool to predict for community lifestyle-specific metabolism.