UrbanMetagenApp - Hochschule Campus Wien

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Research period: 1 October 2016 to 30 September 2019

The urban environment is becoming increasingly important and microorganisms also play a central role in this environment. However, our knowledge of the dynamics of the urban microbiome and how it influences our lives is still largely incomplete. The relatively new field of urban metagenomics is now focussing for the first time on cities and the interplay between humans and the urban microbiome.

The aim of the project is to find out how much the microbiome of the city, with which we constantly come into contact, changes the microbiome of our palms. In other words, how much of the microbes that we touch as we walk through the city actually remain on the surface of our bodies and can thus be transmitted?

For this purpose, an analysis application is being developed that can also be used and interpreted outside the scientific context, with few resources such as time, PC performance, memory and without specialist knowledge. Since not one application can efficiently cover all use cases, parameters for specific use cases must be defined. In the project, the application is optimised for use in urban metagenomics and validated with the planned metagenome study. The application serves as a prototype of an analysis application for urban metagenome analyses. However, the software is designed to be as flexible and modular as possible so that it can be quickly adapted to other use cases.

Research Goals

Main objectives:

Carrying out a metagenome study as a use case
Development of an easily interpretable, low-resource metagenome analysis application
Analysing the data with the developed metagenome application
Visualisation of the data using the metagenome application

Secondary objectives: