Emmy Noether Research Group Virus in Nature and Health
Research Focus
To this end, they have and will develop cutting-edge methodologies for studying phage-host relationships in vitro, in vivo, and in silico.
Methods developed
Bioinformatic toolbox
We built a human virome protein cluster (HVPC) database in order to improve and facilitate functional annotation and characterization of human viromes. This Human Viral Metagenomic Database for Diversity and Function Annotation constitutes of 12 terabases in total, more than 6 Million open reading frames (ORFs), and 927K function clusters. Further improvements such as using machine learning tools (random forest ad neural networks/deep learning) to identify host of viruses using signals including CRISPR, prophages, k-mer, etc. are currently on-going.
Viral tagging
“Viral-Tagging” (VT) is a high-throughput, culture-independent means of experimentally linking wild viruses to a target host, and vice versa. The DNA of uncultivated viruses is labeled non-specifically with a fluorescent dye, then viruses are mixed with a ‘bait host’, and infected cells are collected by fluorescence-activated flow cytometric sorting. The infecting viral DNA is quantitatively amplified to produce viral-tagged metagenomes. VT enables researchers to broadly map how viruses change over space and time.