Congratulations to the Fall 2024 CompMicroLab project students…we had three successful 10-week undergraduate projects! 🎓🥳🎉

Laura presented her project, The effect of single-nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) calling method on bacterial time-scaled phylogeny construction. Laura benchmarked several popular SNP calling methods to determine if choice of core SNP calling method affects time-scaled phylogeny topology and phylodynamic parameter estimation. To do this, she used genomic data from Salmonella DT104, a multidrug-resistant Salmonella lineage that was responsible for a global epidemic among cattle and humans in the 1990s/early 2000s. We’re excited to follow up on Laura’s results in the future (and hopefully convince her to do a third project with us!) 🌲🐄🌍

Kateryna presented her project, Genome mining approaches for novel biosynthetic gene cluster (BGC) discovery in Streptomyces species, in which she mined hundreds of Streptomyces genomes from the mOTUs database for biosynthetic gene clusters (BGCs). We’re hoping that some of Kateryna’s predicted BGCs can lead to the discovery of novel microbial secondary metabolites, with novel uses in medicine or industry (particularly novel biopesticides!), but more importantly, we hope Kateryna can do another project with us in the future! 🐛🪲🧬

Finally, Julian presented his project, Optimal k-mer based clustering of microbial genomes from ultra-shallow single-cell whole-genome sequencing (WGS) data. Julian worked with our close collaborators, the HenLab @ UmU, to develop a novel bioinformatic method for clustering a novel type of WGS data…single-cell WGS data! The software he developed will become part of our new single-cell analysis toolkit, which we’ll be publishing soon! We’re so proud of Julian, and we can’t wait to work on more projects with him in the future! 🦠🫧🧰

Congratulations to Laura, Kateryna, and Julian…we’re so proud of what you were able to accomplish in just ten weeks! 🚀