Anagrafe della ricerca

The aim of this computational project is to investigate from a functional point of view the protein repertoire of genomes deriving from shotgun metagenomics experiments. We will specifically focus on the study of microbiota from a mouse model of Alzheimer's disease, with the ultimate goal of elucidating the role of proteins inferred by reconstructed genomes of unknown species. Nowadays, shotgun metagenomics allows the comprehensive reconstruction of the set of genomes present in a certain biological sample. Most of the currently available bioinformatics tools are mainly focused on the characterization of reconstructed genomes in terms of the gene repertoire, taxa identification and classification. However, relatively little was developed so far for the characterization of the set of proteins annotated on reconstructed genomes, especially in the context of neurodegenerative diseases such as Parkinson's and Alzheimer's disease.