Today (yes, October 12th!) at 4 PM, Dr. Heidi Andersen from Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center will be presenting her bioinformatics research. Computational genomics is a rapidly advancing field that uses and develops software to detect patterns in biomolecules like DNA, RNA, and proteins. Our guts host many different bacterial species, and Dr. Andersen pieces together their DNA sequences to determine which are present. She is especially interested in tracking the microbes that are multi-drug resistant (those that survive many of the antibiotics we throw at them) across pediatric patients in the hospital. 

A quick brush up on some computational biology vocab before the presentation never hurts:

Metagenomics – the study of the many genomes present in a given environmental sample

Microbiome – the community of microbes in a given environment

Shotgun sequencing – a method of determining the order of nucleotides (A, C, T, G) in a given DNA sequence by breaking it into short fragments, sequencing these, then piecing them back together computationally

Contiguous sequence (“Contig”) – After sequencing the separate DNA fragments in shotgun sequencing, we need to assemble them back together for a longer, more complete sequence (a contig)

16S rRNA gene (“16S”) – a ribosomal RNA gene that is used to identify bacteria and archaea at the genus level

Extra credit – Understanding PCA
If you want to know all the gory details of Principal Component Analysis, a method you will see often in computational biology, check out this post here