New student from Germany joins MACCIMO to analyze Nanopore barcode data for WP6

We are happy to welcome Bekir Kasli who started his bioinformatics internship beginning of June, to tackle one of the most challenging datasets produced in MACCIMO: The barcodes of the eukaryotic ribosomal gene sequenced with Oxford Nanopore technology. Identifying and describing the fungal community of the sponge from these sequences, big part of which comes from the host Chondrilla nucula, will require some tweaking of tools and databases, and adapting existing methodology for long reads. Bekir Kasli, a recent graduate in Business Informatics (Ludwigshafen University of Applied Sciences) and soon to be admitted at the Technical University in Munich for a second Bachelor’s in Bioinformatics, is strongly motivated for the task, which will allow him to delve into the molecular ecology world. He will be supervised by WP6 leader Anastasia Gioti, who has double expertise in fungi and Bioinformatics. Anastasia is excited to explore with Bekir this novel approach, which, as she notes, “will allow accurate taxonomic identification of a major -but overall unknown- marine microbial group on the spot”, since the MinIon sequencing device is portable (literally the size of a USB stick).