Developing Novel Bioinformatics Tools for Microbiome Taxonomy

One of the hottest topics in medical research these days is the study of microbial communities' impact on human health and diseases. As in many other data intensive fields of biological sciences, data analysis remains the bottleneck for microbiome research and novel computational tools must be developed to enable biological discoveries. In this talk, Dong will explain in detail a recently developed computational method for a fundamental challenge encountered in microbiome studies (i.e., how to accurately identify various bacterial species from high-throughput DNA sequencing data) as well as another method for using the knowledge of bacterial abundance for disease diagnosis.