Achievement

Our program includes a course, "Problems in Genomics" in which the students conduct interdisciplinary research together as a group. In one project, the trainees are comparing human gut microbiomes from two different geographic locations with a focus on the biology of the viruses that infect these bacteria. The trainees worked with ten available metagenome datasets - six from Europeans and four from Caucasians in the US. Metagenomes represent the combined DNA sequences of many different microbial organisms present in a particular environment, in this case, the human gut. The trainees analyzed and annotated these genomes and are now characterizing the viral components. The trainees are also interested in studying interactions between the viral and bacterial genomes. This project is still in its early stages and is ongoing, but is one of the first explorations of the genomics of viruses in a metagenome dataset from the human gut. A submitted manuscript is expected within the next year.