13 February 2017

Speaker:  Dr Yanni Sun

Associate Professor

Michigan StateUniversity

Dr Yanni Sun presented her recent work on conducting composition and functional analysis for microbial community data. The first project was to reconstruct full-length haplotypes in viral quasi species, which include a population of related but different virus strains. RNA viruses such as HIV, HCV, SARS etc. usually function and evolve as quasi species. Reconstruction of each strain sequence was highly important to characterise the quasi species and thus provides clinic-relevant prevention and treatment. Dr Sun presented the method of effectively assemble short reads into full-length viral haplotypes.

The second project was about improving homology search sensitivity of Pac Bio data by correcting frame shift errors. Long reads technologies such as PacBio provided promising solutions to study complex microbial communities. However, high sequencing error rate hampered its current application. Dr Sun proposed a new method to correct the errors and improve homology search performance.

Dr Yanni Sun

Prof Francis Chin, Head of Department of Computing, thanked and presented souvenirs to the guest