Using computational biology for studying microbial populations

Speaker: Alejandro Reyes Muñoz PhD.
Associated Professor, Group Leader Max Planck Tandem Group in Computational Biology, Universidad de los Andes, Bogotá - Colombia
https://bcem.uniandes.edu.co/wordpress/

Microbiology was completely revolutionized with the development of culture-independent sequencing methods. These methods coupled with the arrival of second and third generation sequencing technologies allowed researchers to study microbes as part of their communities and not in isolation. A new field emerged and grew very fast, as microbial ecology started gaining momentum. However, something the field was not ready for was the enormous amount of sequencing data generated. Traditional microbiologist had to quickly evolve to molecular biologist, microbial ecologist and finally computational biologists. In this webinar we will show a brief overview of how this methods have changed the way we see our human self, now as part of a collection of trillions of microbes and how computational biology has been instrumental in this process.