Advancing environmental biotechnologies through advanced microbiology and cutting-edge computational statistics.

Advances in culture-independent, high-throughput technologies have transformed the way we examine microbial communities – collectively called ‘the microbiome’, which are known to impact a wide range of environmental systems. However, analytical tool development is critically trailing behind data generation, which hinders the analysis, understanding or integration of microbiome data. Dr Kim-Anh Lê Cao is a pioneer in developing methods and tools for data integration which adopt a holistic, data-driven and hypothesis-free approach. This project brings together the University of Melbourne (with the Melbourne Integrative Genomics group in the school of Mathematics and Statistics, the Melbourne Geomicrobiology Lab, and the Microbial Ecology group in the School of Bioscience), and Irstea (Institut national de recherche en sciences et technologies).

This interdisciplinary research initiative aims at exploring and accelerating discoveries in these new frontier technologies and build capacity in best practice statistical analysis, nationally and internationally through a network of French and Australian microbiologist researchers. This initiative will focus on the practical aspects of microbiome data analysis with a 2-day workshop presenting methodologies for data analysis and integration, a 2-week discussion with participants to offer guidance, and a 1-day close-out to share findings and plan future collaborations and publications arising from the analyses.

Complex microbial networks have a central role in the provision and regulation of ecosystems that inspire multiple microbial biotechnologies applications to contribute substantively to global efforts to achieve sustainability, through purification of wastewater, waste valorisation, bioremediation strategies, and bioenergy production. Understanding key environmental factors that shape microbial communities is crucial to optimize such biotechnological advances.

Contact: Kim-Anh Le Cao (kimanh.lecao@unimelb.edu.au)

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