Abstract

NGS and Metagenomics: QC and Other Analysis Considerations

Pramila Tata, Deputy Research Director, Syngene

With the increasing awareness of the role of microbial communities in human health and disease,  metagenomis is rapidly evolving as a major therapeutic area. While the existing methodologies gives us  a snapshot of the microbiome of a given location,  diagnostic metagenomics needs to be accurate,  take into consideration several variables and be able to detect clinically relevant pathogens. Apart from read QC, bioinformatics pipelines have to address the problem of  contamination with host reads, low and differential abundance of the pathogens and understanding the microbial ecology so as link the pathogens to disease state.  The role of bioinformatics in making clinical metagenomics a reality will be discussed