Project

Microbial eukaryotes play key roles in earth’s ecosystem and human lives, but knowledge of their biodiversity and evolution are very incomplete. This collaborative project between MDAP, the Faculty of Science, Faculty of Medicine, CSIRO and Royal Botanic Gardens Melbourne aims to bring big data to this field of research, advancing our knowledge of microbial eukaryotic biodiversity and evolution by extracting their organelle genomes (mitochondria & chloroplasts) from publicly available metagenomes. Through this project, we aim to achieve:

1. A fully functioning pipeline for automated download of metagenome reads, their assembly and calculation of contig statistics,
2. A large library of assembled metagenomes generated with this pipeline, permitting testing of alternative strategies for organelle genome binning,
3. Advanced proof of concept for externally funded project proposals based on these ideas.