Research Project
Full description The Beatson group aims to better understand the molecular mechanisms of infectious disease and identify potential therapeutic and diagnostic targets by exploiting "Next-gen" genomic data. A major focus of the group is the comparative analysis of genomes obtained from local clinical isolates of important human pathogens. World-wide there are thousands of bacterial genome and meta-genome projects in progress, but the bottleneck remains data analysis. A major priority in the group is the development of bioinformatics software to effectively utilise next-generation sequence data. Current projects range from researching fundamental questions such as "how has Escherichia coli pathogenesis evolved?" and "how are genes transferred between bacteria?" to the identification of potential diagnostic and vaccine targets and the development of software tools to enable integrated analysis of hundreds or thousands of bacterial genomes. More information can be found at http://beatsonlab.com/