Project: Microbiome Evolution: Unlocking Insights from Metagenomics
Deciphering how bacteria evolve within humans is key to understanding several critical issues, including the rise of antibiotic resistance. To gain deeper insights into bacterial evolution, treatment response, and transmission dynamics, we need novel computational tools and methods to analyse metagenomic data and estimate evolutionary rates. By considering large novel metagenomic datasets, this project will investigate the within-host mutation and recombination rates of bacteria. We have access to deep long-read sequencing data from over 300 multi-strain samples of Streptococcus pneumoniae from a refugee camp in Thailand, along with one of the largest datasets collected to study multi-species bacterial transmission within a hospital. This project would suit both someone interested in methods development as well as the application of existing methods to large unique datasets of importance to public health.
Project Site: The Peter Doherty Institute for Infection and Immunity & Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre
Research degrees at the Doherty Institute are administered by the University of Melbourne.