Jake is a PhD student in the Genomics and Computational Biology (GCB) graduate group and spent his 2nd rotation with us. He employed ‘hybrid’ (short + long read) genome assembly methods to generate one of the first complete genomes for Clostridium hiranonis, a bile-acid producing member of the gut microbiome that is implicated in maintaining gut health through the production of secondary bile acids. Jake then annotated this genome and used comparative genomic approaches to understand population genetics of C. hiranonis across animals and humans. Since there is only one other complete genome available for this organism, Jake turned to mining our shotgun metagenomic data from animal stool samples and identified ~20 samples for which the metagenomic reads provide at least 100x coverage of the C. hiranonis genome. He used contigs from the metagenome assembled genomes (MAGs) in his comparative analysis.
Jacob Leiby
Jacob Leiby
Rotation student (GCB)
