Forget their names: understanding the microbiome without focusing on individual microbes

March 15, 2019 @ 11:00 am to 12:00 pm

Yana Bromberg, Ph.D., Associate Professor, Department of Biochemistry and Microbiology, Rutgers University

W203 Millennium Science Complex
University Park

Microbes run the world... but they don't care for the names we give them. In other words, the microbiome environment selects for particular functional abilities, rather than particular microbes. Thus, the question of “who is there?” is not as relevant as “what are they doing?”

Focusing on microbial molecular functionality, instead of names or taxa, allows for a better description of microbial and microbiome-ial abilities, similarities, and differences. The recent emergence of high-throughput genomic sequencing, coupled with the growing analytical capacities, has unlocked new horizons in our study of the microbial world. However, deeper understanding will not simply diffuse from deeper machine learning applied to this data, but from more explicit focus on molecular function and its alteration in different conditions. Our lab’s novel computational methods leverage patterns in changes of microbiome functional properties to predict individual disease susceptibility and treatment effects, equally well as to identify bioremediation success or city of microbiome origin. That is, by adopting a functional point of view in analyzing microbial and microbiome data we are able map emergent functionalities of condition (or niche) -specific microbiomes.