Conan Zhao (Brown Lab) will be speaking about his work of mapping microbiome structure to lung health

"Mapping microbiome structure to lung health"

The polymicrobial context of chronic infection has received increasing attention due to widespread use of microbiome sequencing technology. However, clinical microbiology analysis of infection samples in hospitals continues to focus only on established human pathogens. This disconnect between diverse ‘infection microbiomes’ and limited clinical microbiology profiling leaves open the possibility that important risk markers are missed during infection management. In this study, we build linear models predicting lung health of Cystic Fibrosis patients. We show that we can improve model accuracy by looking at the whole lung microbiome composition rather than only the canonical CF pathogens.