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

Selected Publications

Barquist L, Vogel J
Accelerating discovery and functional analysis of small RNAs with new technologies
Annu Rev Genet 2015, 49: 367-394

Wheeler NE, Gardner PP, Barquist L
Machine learning identifies signatures of host adaptation in the bacterial pathogen Salmonella enterica
PLos Genetics In press

Barquist L, Mayho M, Cummins C, Cain AK, Boinett CJ, Page AJ, Langridge GC, Quail MA, Keane JA, Parkhill J
The TraDIS toolkit: sequencing and analysis for dense transposon mutant libraries
Bioinformatics 2016, 32(7): 1109-1111

Wheeler NE, Barquist L, Kingsley RA, Gardner PP
A profile-based method for identifying functional divergence of orthologous genes in bacterial genes
Bioinformatics 2016, 32(23): 3566-3574

Westermann AJ, Förstner KU, Amman F, Barquist L, Chao Y, Schulte LN, Müller L, Reinhardt R, Stadler PF, Vogel J
Dual RNA-seq unveils noncoding RNA functions in host-pathogen interactions
Nature 2016, 529(7587): 496-501
 

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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