This event has been postponed due to the coronavirus pandemic. The decision has been made out of an abundance of caution with the health and well-being of our guests and community in mind. We hope to have a new date soon.

Join us for a seminar on "The Social Network of Microbiomes” with Dr. Giri Narasimhan, Professor, Bioinformatics Research Group (BioRG); School of Computing and Information Sciences, Florida International University.  The seminar will take place on Friday, March 20, 3 pm in AHC3 214.

Microbial communities found in nature are not diverse, dynamic, and display a wide variety of beneficial and harmful interactions within the community and with their environment. Not unlike the characteristics of a human “social network,” their interactions can be complex. Microbiomes are typically studied using next generation sequencing technologies. Standard analysis pipelines can help in understanding the composition of microbiomes and their diversity. They can help identify differential abundant microbial taxa between two or more cohorts. This talk will discuss how to advance the state-of-the-art in microbiome analysis by focusing on the study of interactions within the community.

Network-based approaches can help in inferring groups of competing and cooperating microbial taxa, lend themselves to generalized inferences from multi-omics datasets, allow for inferring relative importance of entities in the microbiome, allow for inferring directional relationships, allow for inferring temporal relationships in longitudinal datasets, and even allow for inferring causal relationships. He will also discuss the implementation of efficient software pipelines through plugins, the role of high-performance computing in microbiome analysis, and validation of some of the interactions in the laboratory.