The Metagenomics project is working to create a database of bacteria and archaea organisms found in the equine microbiome. Along with these organism’s identification, the database will have information on how the microbiome is impacted by the digestion and fermentation of different nutrients such as carbohydrates or proteins. This research will help others to predict the functional differences between each community. This research will be helpful for future researchers to determine if the bacteria or archaea they find is a big inhibitor of the microbiome or just something that they happened to swallow. The completion of this project will also aid future researchers so they will be able to lookup an organism and find out what types of environments it is found in. This research is so interesting because there are so many different species of bacteria. It will be very rewarding once the full database list is complete.
Zoe Seitz. and Allie Baiungo are the two undergraduate students working on this research project. They are under the guidance of Dr. Amy Biddle and her Graduate student Alexa Johnson. To get involved in this research people should contact Dr. Biddle via email.
