In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of

Master of Science in Biology

in the

School of Biological Sciences

Piyush Ranjan

Will defend his thesis

“Applied Bioinformatics for exploring diversity patterns in Meta-omic data”

Friday, April 20th, 2018

1:30 PM

Cherry Emerson Building (CE), Room 322

Thesis Advisor

Dr. Frank Stewart

School of Biological Sciences

Georgia Institute of Technology

Committee Members

Dr. Jung Choi (Biological Sciences)

Dr. Jennifer Glass (Earth and Atmospheric Sciences)

Summary

This thesis explores the utility of applied bioinformatic approaches to better understand sequence space and phylogenetic diversity in clinical and environmental datasets. In three chapters, the thesis describes how applied bioinformatic techniques can be used to 1) identify and quantify sequence variation in off-target activity by CRISPR-Cas9 nuclease using high throughput targeted gene amplicon sequencing; 2) identify and quantify the abundance of bacterial defense systems, CRISPRs, in natural microbial communities living in marine oxygen minimum zones using high-throughput metagenome sequencing and 3) investigate phylogenetic variation in an underexplored phylum level class of bacteria, Atribacteria, that live in high concentrations in marine methane hydrates again using high-throughput metagenome sequencing.