The final webinar of 2022 was presented by Professor Krasimira Tsaneva-Atanasova, Professor of Mathematics for Healthcare and Director of the EPSRC Hub for Quantitative Modelling in Healthcare at the University of Exeter. See below for a recording of the seminar.

Title: Integrative microbiomics in respiratory medicine

Abstract: Traditionally, human microbiology has been based on laboratory focused cultures of microbes isolated from human specimens in patients with acute or chronic respiratory infections. These approaches primarily view human respiratory diseases through the lens of a single species and its relevant clinical setting however such approaches fail to account for the surrounding environment and wide microbial diversity that exists in vivo. Given the emergence of next generation sequencing technologies and advancing bioinformatic pipelines, researchers now have unprecedented capabilities to characterise the respiratory microbiome in terms of its taxonomy, function, antibiotic resistance and even bacteriophages. Despite this, the analysis of microbial communities has largely been restricted to ordination, ecological measures, and discriminant taxa analysis. This is predominantly due to a lack of suitable computational tools to facilitate microbiome analytics. In this talk I will introduce the available and emerging analytical techniques including integrative analysis, microbial association networks, topological data analysis (TDA) and mathematical modelling. I will then present our recently developed approach to the multi-biome that integrates bacterial, viral, and fungal communities in the context of several clinically relevant applications in respiratory medicine.