Quince Group
Developing improved methods for understanding microbial communities
The High-resolution Microbiomics group focusses on both theoretical and experimental methods for microbial community analysis. Combining statistical bioinformatics with technological developments in sequencing and ‘omics data generation to resolve both the microbes present in a community and their functional roles and interactions. Current areas of focus include strain resolution from metagenomes, integration of metabolomics and metagenomics, and mathematical models of community assembly. These methods are applied to both simple bench-top experiments with microbial communities and large scale 'omics studies. These studies span a range of environments from host-associated to biotechnology applications.
Methods development
Algorithms developed by our group have been incorporated into a number of bioinformatics pipelines for metagenomics maintained by ourselves and others. These include CONCOCT for metagenome binning - https://github.com/BinPro/CONCOCT, STRONG for strain resolution on assembly graphs - https://github.com/chrisquince/STRONG, and MetaHood - https://github.com/Sebastien-Raguideau/Metahood, which is an integrated metagenome analysis pipeline. We are currently working on the following novel methods:
Applications
Our existing pipelines and these novel methods will be applied to a wide range of systems including: