Organisms Commons^™

Prediction Of The Vaginal Microbiome Using Urine Samples, Christopher R. Diachok

Theses and Dissertations

The vaginal microbiome is associated with women’s health, including but not limited to the pathogenesis of bacterial vaginosis, adverse pregnancy outcomes including preterm birth and sexually transmitted infections. However, there has been very limited research on the urinary microbiome and its relationship to the vaginal microbiome. We sought to predict the vaginal microbiome profile using clean catch urine samples from the same person. Here, paired vaginal and urine samples were collected and sequenced by 16S ribosomal RNA sequencing. Alpha and beta diversity analysis showed that there was no significant difference between the paired vaginal and urine microbiomes. In fact, a …

A Systems Biology Approach For Predicting Essential Genes And Deciphering Their Dynamics Under Stress In Streptococcus Sanguinis, Fadi El-Rami

Theses and Dissertations

Infectious diseases are the top leading cause of death worldwide. Identifying essential genes, genes indispensable for survival, has been proven indispensable in defining new therapeutic targets against pathogens, major elements of the minimal set genome to be harnessed in synthetic biology, and determinants of evolutionary relationships of phylogenetically distant species. Thus, essentiality studies promise valuable revenues that can decipher much of biological complexities.

Taking advantage of the available microbial sequences and the essentiality studies conducted in various microbial models, we proposed a framework for the prediction of essential genes based on our experimentally verified knowledge of the pathways involved in …