Algorithms for metabolic pathway discovery and analysis in the human microbiome
Victoria Pascal
Epigenetics in cancer and cell differentiation group in Germans Trias i Pujol Research Institute (IGTP)
Metabolites derived from specialized primary metabolism are key players in the
crosstalk with the host and constitute major modulators of host phenotypes. Many of
these known metabolites are encoded in gene clusters. However, the options to
systematically analyze microbial genomes for specialized primary metabolic gene
clusters were limited. In this talk, I will present gutSMASH, a tool to metabolically
profile the human microbiome for known and putative gene clusters. In order to go
beyond bacteria’s functional potential, we also developed BiG-MAP an algorithm to
assess gene cluster abundance and expression by using metagenomic and
metatranscriptomic data as input. Combining different omics data can ultimately help
providing causation between microbiome host-phenotypes and get more biological
insights at different molecular levels. During the talk I will highlight the analysis we
have performed using these tools in combination with different datasets to ultimately
show our findings, which constitute a starting point to understand the role bacteria
have in the overall chemistry of the human microbiome.