Microbial communities may inform understanding of rapid evolution

Lauren Michael, a research computing facilitator at the Center for High Throughput Computing (CHTC), says researchers tend to use the CHTC resources for two reasons: they have massive volumes of data or a need for incredibly complex computations.

Bontrager has a bit of both, and uses the CHTC resources for two primary research methods. The first is 16S sequencing. This involves sequencing a region of one gene that happens to be present in all bacteria and using it as a barcode to compare samples against databases of known bacterial strains.