In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of
Master of Science in Biology
in the
School of Biological Sciences
Piyush Ranjan
Will defend his thesis
“Applied Bioinformatics for exploring diversity patterns in Meta-omic data”
Friday, April 20th, 2018
1:30 PM
Cherry Emerson Building (CE), Room 322
Thesis Advisor
Dr. Frank Stewart
School of Biological Sciences
Georgia Institute of Technology
Committee Members
Dr. Jung Choi (Biological Sciences)
Dr. Jennifer Glass (Earth and Atmospheric Sciences)
Summary
This thesis explores the utility of applied bioinformatic approaches to better understand sequence space and phylogenetic diversity in clinical and environmental datasets. In three chapters, the thesis describes how applied bioinformatic techniques can be used to 1) identify and quantify sequence variation in off-target activity by CRISPR-Cas9 nuclease using high throughput targeted gene amplicon sequencing; 2) identify and quantify the abundance of bacterial defense systems, CRISPRs, in natural microbial communities living in marine oxygen minimum zones using high-throughput metagenome sequencing and 3) investigate phylogenetic variation in an underexplored phylum level class of bacteria, Atribacteria, that live in high concentrations in marine methane hydrates again using high-throughput metagenome sequencing.
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