ReStrain: Discovery of markers of a healthy gut microbiome through computational and experimental means (academic-industry collaboration)

The newly founded Hildebrand group and established Juge group investigate bacterial communities through metagenomics and functional genomics approaches at the Quadram Institute Bioscience / the Earlham Institute, leading research centres in food, gut biology and genomics, on the Norwich Research Park. The industrial partner, Eagle Genomics, is a world leading expert in data mining and knowledge discovery located in Cambridge, where the student will be located for several months.
Metagenomics is the description of all microorganisms in a given sample. In this PhD project work will be undertaken with large datasets of human gut metagenomes, deploying and optimizing already developed pipelines, and will explore bacterial associations to health and disease to gain expert knowledge in the highly resolved phylogenies as well as mobile genetic elements within the human gut microbiome.