Rob Finn, Microbiologist at the EMBL-European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI), giving a talk entitled "Meet Your Microbiome", on the Humans Stage, at New Scientist Live 2019


Rob explores microbiomes across the planet from the human gut to vast oceans. Sampling and analysing DNA from these very different environments is enabling us to tackle some of society’s biggest challenges: from identifying the microbial make up of a healthy gut to finding bacteria that may help us to rid the oceans of harmful plastic waste. In this talk, Rob will introduce how he is looking to identify the bacteria that live in the human gut from healthy and ill people and how this may enable us to repair a person’s microbiome to restore a healthy gut. Rob Finn leads EMBL-EBI’s Sequence Families team and also looks after EMBL-EBI's fast-growing metagenomics data service, called MGnify. Rob has a small research group that probes the functions of microbial dark matter. He 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. Rob’s academic background is in microbiology and he holds a PhD in biochemistry from Imperial College, London. Our services use complex mathematical models tailored for life-science research. For example, the HMMER3 algorithm offers fast detection of distantly related proteins and is available through our HMMER website infrastructure. We aim to simplify access to curated, complex data, and to maximise biological knowledge by extending annotation based on sequence similarity.


Size: 4346px × 3597px
Location: ExCel London, One Western Gateway, Royal Victoria Dock,
Photo credit: © John Gaffen / Alamy / Afripics
License: Licensed
Model Released: No

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