PhD project: Mobilomics - the study of molecular elements involved in rapid bacterial evolution

University:  Aarhus university

Department: Department of Environmental Science 

Section: EMBI (But is also located at PLEN at KU - Copenhagen university)

Supervisors: Lars Hestbjerg Hansen (KU), Witold P. Kot (KU) and Alexandre M. B. Anesio (AU)

Project term: 01.05.2018 - 30.04.2021

Master's degree: MSc in biology-biotechnology specialized in Microbiology, University of Copenhagen, Denmark

Background:

The extent of my research is mobile genetic elements (MGEs), such as (but not limited to) plasmids, transposons, and bacteriophages from various environments. These environments includes lakewater near contaminated sites and arctic glaciers. Doing my PhD I will build and analyze sequence libraries highly enriched in circular MGEs, which are referred as Mobilomes. Furthermore, I will generate libraries referred to as viromes, which consist of bacteriophages from environments such as human feaces, waste water and organic waste run-off.

As mobilomics is a relatively new research area, there are some massive biases limiting high-throughput Mobilome generation. 

Aim:

Hence, my aim includes optimization of methods to extract circular MGEs from environmental samples, eliminating methodological biases when exacting and amplifiyng the DNA, as well as identify superior bioinformatics tools and pipelines to extract true circular MGEs from massive sequencing data. 

Research outline:

Water filtration, metaviromics extraction (bacteriophages), bioinformatics etc.