The complex communities of bacteria that live on or in humans and animals play a crucial role in the development and health of their host. Until recently, our ability to address questions about the structure and function of microbial communities has been limited by a lack of methods to accurately identify community members and monitor their dynamics. The application of Next-Generation Sequencing (NGS) techniques is revolutionizing the accessibility of DNA sequence data. However, it is also presenting tremendous challenges to biologists in data interpretation and visualization.
My work is focused on exploiting NGS data to profile bacterial communities, identify species richness and microbial diversity and connect community structure and dynamics with health status in the host.