Congmin Xu

BME PhD Proposal Presentation

Date/Time: July 26th at 10am (PEK time)  

Location: Liaokaiyuan Building, Peking University

Committee Members:

Dr. Huaiqiu Zhu, Thesis advisor (Peking University)

Dr. Peng Qiu, Thesis co-advisor (Georgia Institute of Technology and Emory University)

Dr. Haifeng Chen (Peking University)

Dr. Xiaolin Gong (Guang'anmen Hospital of TCM)

Dr. Ziding Zhang (China Agricultural University)

Title: Metagenomic analysis of human gut microbiome of hosts suffering from various diseases 

Abstract: “The microbes inside human gut constitute the backbone of the gut ecological system by controlling the biochemical cycling of elements essential for life. This large and dynamic ecological niche can benefit the host through various approaches such as supplying nutrition, influencing immune system and resisting pathogens. Plethora of studies have revealed the dysbiosis of human gut microbiota are related to multiple diseases. However, these separate studies and incomparable data sets missed the forest for the trees. The goal of this research is to comprehensively characterize how the gut microbiota consistently transform while the hosts are under different pathological conditions. To achieve this goal, a large scale of WGS data of human gut microbiome were collected, including six types of pathological conditions and their healthy controls. The raw data were pre-processed and uniformly annotated. Additionally, new methodology for the binning of metagenomics data has been leveraged to structurally organize the abundant metagenomic data and reduce the magnitude of complexity. Analyses were designed in a systematical manner, including the analyses of taxonomic composition, functional genes, taxonomic co-occurrence network and also functional gene-gene interaction network.I will investigate the intersection with the aim to answer what kinds of human gut microbial community are healthy.”