What I Did
I did all of the Galaxy work for this project. I created workflows, troubleshooted them, and did a bit of analysis on the data that was generated from them. In the initial phases of the project, I did some research on malaria and its relation to the gut to understand what phyla/bacteria were related to our project. I also assisted with the uniformity of the poster.
How You Can Help
To continue this project, I would like to obtain fecal samples from healthy children in Uganda to act as a more sufficient and comparable control. There is a lot of variation in the gut between adults and children so while the Zymo Fecal Reference was sufficient for our project, it would be better to draw conclusions with a dataset that has less confounding variables (such as age).
What I Did: I helped mainly with the study design, including the hypothesis and analysis. I researched the significance of phylum rations like F/B for gut dysbiosis and looked at what other markers we could use to compare the gut microbiomes of both cohorts. Among these were Proteobacteria and Actinobacteria abundance and Shannon’s diversity, which I converted to effective number of species. I found the healthy literature ranges to use for each measure as well. I did much of the writing for the poster as well as the tables and graphs.
How you can help:
Find a control dataset that is much more consistent in geography and age to our malaria and malnourished cohorts. If you have a control that is strongly consistent, it would also be helpful to look at the pathogen burden and ratios of each 3 since they will be more indicative of what an infant gut looks like.
What I Did: I helped with the introduction and background of our project, and made sure we incorporated feedback received from our peers and instructors. I also helped generate our introduction graphical abstract and made sure our poster was organized with captions for our figures.
How you can help:
As Hannah and Silvana stated, finding a control dataset that analyzes the microbiome of healthy children would be very helpful to compare against our findings.