Integrative Informatics for Infection Biology
Recent years have seen accelerating development of high-throughput technologies in infection biology. Now, thousands of genetic loci can be simultaneously interrogated in a single experiment, providing an array of measurements of transcription, translation, regulatory interactions, and fitness effects. The bottleneck in advancing our understanding of pathogens now lies in moving from hypothesis-free screening through data integration to hypothesis generation. We develop new statistical, computational, and visualization approaches to overcome this bottleneck in the interpretation of complex post-genomic data. This group is located at the Helmholtz Institute for RNA-based Infection Research (HIRI).
Leader
Jun Prof Dr Lars Barquist
“High-throughput technologies are changing the way biology is done, requiring the development of new computational and statistical tools. We aim to harness these technologies to bring new insights into bacterial pathogenesis.”
Jun Prof Dr Lars Barquist

Lars Barquist studied biomathematics at Rutgers University (New Jersey, USA) before working in the department of bioengineering at the University of California, Berkeley. He received a PhD from the University of Cambridge (UK) in 2014 for work on comparative functional pathogen genomics at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute. From 2014 to 2016 he was supported by an Alexander von Humboldt research fellowship at the Institute for Molecular Infection Biology at the University of Würzburg.
Further Information
A current overview of the team and further information about the research group can be found on the HIRI page.