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Prof. Dr. Daniel Huson
Center for Bioinformatics
University of Tuebingen

Topic: Computational analysis of metagenomic and metatranscriptomic data using MEGAN

Date: Wednesday, November 28, 2012
Time: 2pm
Location: Room 3118, Biomolecular Sciences Building

Details:

Metagenomic sequencing is currently a hot topic in biology and medicine. As the number and size of sequencing datasets continue to grow, there is a need for continued improvement of the bioinformatics tools that are used to process and analyze such datasets.

Over the last eight years, we have continuously worked on the development of such tools and our main contribution is the program MEGAN, a metagenome analyzer, that can be used to perform both functional and taxonomic analysis of metagenomic and metatranscriptomic data, on the scale of hundreds of millions of reads. After an introduction to the area of metagenomics, we will present some of the features of MEGAN, will discuss some metagenome projects that we are currently involved in and then will give a outlook on some new developments.

Sridhar Hannenhalli named Interim Director of CBCB: Sridhar Hannenhalli is named as the Interim Director of Center for Bioinformatics and Computational Biology for the coming year. Sridhar is a prominent computational biologist with extensive experience in the computational biology industry (Glaxo Smith-Kline and Celera Genomics) and academia (University of Southern California, Penn State, and U Penn) before coming to Maryland in 2010. Sridhar has been making important and creative contributions from the very beginning of his scientific career, including the development of what is now widely known as the Hannenhalli-Pevzner theory in the study of genomic rearrangements. In the last few years Sridhar has chosen to move even deeper into biological questions, becoming a leader in the important field of transcriptional regulation by using computational modeling and comparative genomics to characterize regulatory sites and regulatory networks.