Development of instrumental and bioinformatic pipelines to accelerate commercial applications of metagenomics approaches

This collaborative R&D project is aimed at the development of experimental and bioinformatic pipelines to accelerate the commercial application of metagenomic approaches. Currently, these are error-prone, slow and cumbersome. The developed tools will have wide applicability across many industry sectors and will radically alter approaches to microbial control, and facilitate the discovery of more efficacious, targeted and environmentally friendly biocides. The £2.3M TSB-funded project brings together a team of academic (Liverpool University, Centre for Genome Research and University of Glasgow) and commercial (Unilever, Skalene, Biocontrol) experts in microbiology, genomics, bioinformatics and instrumentation to develop robust, simple procedures and processes for determining and understanding the structure and functional capacity of microbial communities.