Nicole Wheeler | Bioinformatician + Data Scientist
Defining risk in bacterial strains
How do we identify more invasive strains of Salmonella?
Invasive lineages of Salmonella undergo similar changes in their metabolism and the way they interact with their host. We have trained a machine learning algorithm to identify these changes.
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Since the algorithm was published, it has been used to characterise the first extensively drug-resistant strain of invasive, non-typhoidal Salmonella, found in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. It has also been used to examine the impact of human behaviour on the evolution of Salmonella Typhimurium.
What makes invasive strains of Campylobacter jejuni different?
We compared clinical strains of Campylobacter jejuni from invasive infections with closely related UK strains, and found several genes that accumulate functionally significant mutations at a different rate in invasive and gastrointestinal strains.
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These findings lead to the observation that a number of clinical strains had undergone changes in shape which may have implications for how they transmit to new patients.
What causes some people to get meningitis?
In outbreaks of meningitis, sometimes the household contacts of an infected patient carry nearly identical strains, yet they don't get sick. It is unclear whether this is due to differences in the people involved, or subtle differences in the strains that infect them.
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To look into this further, we compared the genomes and transcriptomes of isolates from patients and their household contacts from an outbreak of meningitis that occurred in New Zealand in the 1990s.
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