DiversiPHI-ing research skills in Australia

Between September and early December 2023, Tina Hauptfeld, affiliated with the Utrecht University MGX Group, participated in a PhD exchange with Susie Grigson  from the FAMEExternal link lab in Adelaide. While Susie visited the VEO Group in Jena and MGX Group in Utrecht, Tina worked at the FAME lab with the research group led by Prof. Robert EdwardsExternal link, a longstanding collaborator of Bas Dutilh.

The DiversiPHI project aims to further elucidate the interaction between phages and their hosts, which is mediated by many different factors, e.g. taxonomy of the phage and host, genomically encoded functions, and ecological variables. In particular the influence of the environment has not yet been explored on a large scale. Together with researchers from the FAME lab, VEO, and the University of AdelaideExternal link, Tina analyzed the phages present in all public assembled metagenome datasets, a task that would have been computationally impossible until just a few years ago, but can now be done with fast bioinformatics tools and big computers. From the phages’ and potential hosts’ abundance profiles across different biomes, the genes encoded by the phages, and potential interaction predicted between the viruses and bacteria in the sample, Tina aims to learn more about the environment’s influence on infection.

After the PhD exchange, Tina and Susie went to the biggest bioinformatics conference in Australia, the ABACBS 2023External link in Brisbane. In the session Agricultural and Environmental Omics, Tina got to present some of her previous research, while Susie presented her poster on phage synteny. A couple of days later, Tina won 1st prize in the ABACBS 2023 Stereo-seq Spatial Data ChallengeExternal link by BGI!

The reinforced collaboration between the FAME lab and VEO/MGX is going to be a great asset to our phage research projects, such as DiversiPHI.