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

Our Research

High-throughput functional genomics technologies are providing unprecedented views of cellular behavior at genome scale. Understanding how bacterial and host cells respond to complex processes like infection increasingly requires the integration and unified interpretation of these diverse technologies.

We are using modern data science technologies, including visualization, machine learning, and statistical modeling to extract biological insight from high-throughput genomic and post-genomic data. We have particular interests in using these technologies to understand the effects of RNA-based regulation in bacteria, and non-coding RNA’s role in host-pathogen interactions and the evolution of pathogens.

Further Information

A current overview of the team and further information about the research group can be found on the HIRI page.

Video

  • Novel COVID testing method

    CRISPR discovery from Würzburg paves the way for LEOPARD

    Am I infected with SARS-CoV-2? Is it one of the dangerous variants? Being able to answer these and more questions with a single efficient diagnostic test can be decisive for gauging the spread of disease and selecting the right therapy. In a study published today in the journal "Science", researchers from Würzburg at the Helmholtz Institute for RNA-based Infection Research (HIRI), a site of the Helmholtz Centre for Infection Research (HZI) in cooperation with the Julius Maximilians University (JMU), tackle this challenge with a new CRISPR discovery they translated into a diagnostic platform called LEOPARD.

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