Better prediction of bacterial properties

Each bacterial species has not just a single genome, but a diverse ensemble of gene combinations. This means that the properties of bacteria are constantly changing – for example, how ill they can make us humans or how resistant they are to antibiotics. RESIST researcher Prof. Galardini is dedicated to this topic. He is developing methods to better predict the properties that arise from genetic variations. He and his team have now developed software that facilitates genome-wide association studies (GWAS) – studies that investigate the question of which gene is responsible for which trait. “We, Judit Burgaya, Bamu F. Damaris, Jenny Fiebig and I wrote this software as a real team effort,” says Prof. Galardini. The results were published in the journal Microbial Genomics.

“Our microGWAS integrates the most advanced tools for performing bacterial GWAS in a single, user-friendly and reproducible pipeline. This democratises these analyses,” explains Prof. Galardini. The researchers tested the microGWAS pipeline on a previously published data set on the pathogenic effect of the bacterial species Escherichia coli and successfully identified which variants enable the bacteria to cause disease.

Marco Galardini holds a professorship funded by RESIST at MHH. He heads the research group “Systems Biology of Microbial Communities” at the Institute of Molecular Bacteriology at TWINCORE.

The software can be accessed here.