Dr. Rob Finn heads the Genome Assembly and Annotation Section and is the lead of the Microbiome Informatics team at EMBL’s European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI). This team produces MGnify, a world leading resource for the functional and taxonomic analysis and archiving of microbiome derived sequence data. In addition to making large numbers of datasets available that have been processed in a systematic way, the resource allows scientists to upload their own data, either privately or publicly, and assemble and analyse their data. Rob joined EMBL-EBI from the Janelia Research Campus in the US, where he led a group that designed fast, web-based, interactive protein-sequence searches and annotations. Between 2001 and 2010, he was the project leader for Pfam at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in the UK. Rob’s academic background is in microbiology and he holds a PhD in biochemistry from Imperial College, London.

Exploring microbial diversity across scales and biomes

Modern DNA sequence technologies have transformed the way that we can measure genomic diversity, with on-going efforts to sequence all eukaryotic genomes, as well as metagenomics projects producing thousands of metagenome assemble genomes (MAGs) from a single study. This deluge is of genomic information is providing new insights into the complexity of different communities and holobionts, the interplay between the different community members and clues to their functional contributions. In this presentation, I will draw on examples of bacteria and phage interplay, surveys of lichen holobionts and large MAG catalogues.