Mining Metagenomes for New Phages

Project description

We are surrounded by bacteria and viruses, and our research uses AI and Computer Science to understand them. In the lab, our students use a technique called metagenomics, which allows us to recover DNA sequences directly from microbial communities, revealing enormous numbers of bacteria and viruses that have never been cultured. Generating the DNA sequence data is the easy part! The computer science and AI tools that we are developing are new and exciting, pushing boundaries in science. Your project will use computational approaches to identify sequences from metagenomic data, annotate genes, and predict how bacteria and viruses interact. The project is in computer science, and we'll teach you to use the high-performance computers at Flinders, NCI, and Pawsey.  

Further information

For more information about our research, check out our lab website and the FAME group's website. Rob has a whole series of YouTube videos on Computer Science (including Data Structures), bioinformatics, and crossing between the two subjects.

Assumed knowledge

You don't need any biological knowledge to begin, and we'll teach you the fundamentals as we go along. Some experience in R or Python would be awesome, but we also code in C/C++/Rust, and so we're happy to work with you. A lot of our work involves using large HPC computers, so we use the Unix/Linux command line for that work.

Note: You need to register interest in projects from different supervisors (not a number of projects with the one supervisor).
You must also contact each supervisor directly to discuss both the project details and your suitability to undertake the project.