Project title
Disentangling the gut-brain axis through meta-analyses
Collaborators and funding
Work is funded through an NHMRC Investigator grant.
Contact(s)
- Feargal Ryan, Flinders University, Feargal.ryan@flinders.edu.au
Project description and aims
This project aims to disentangle gut–brain axis signals by conducting large-scale meta-analyses across thousands of publicly available shotgun metagenomes. Our primary objectives are to:
- Taxonomic profiling of shotgun metagenomes to establish baseline microbial composition.
- Taxon set enrichment analysis (TaxSEA) to detect coordinated shifts in functionally related microbial groups.
- De novo assembly–based epitope mining to identify microbial proteins with potential cross-reactivity to host neural or immune epitopes.
- Gene family–level testing to assess functional shifts beyond taxonomy, improving biological interpretability.
- Standardised multi-cohort pipelines for reproducible, scalable meta-analyses.
How is ABLeS supporting this work?
This work is supported through the Production Bioinformatics scheme provided by ABLeS. The support includes storage and compute allocation.
Expected outputs enabled by participation in ABLeS
All outputs will be published in open-access journals as mandated by our primary funding body, the NHMRC. Any software or pipelines developed will be open source, shared via my lab’s GitHub and deposited in community repositories (e.g. Bioconductor), as we have done previously. Currently, the scale of datasets required particularly for the cross-reactive epitope pipeline is a major barrier on Flinders University infrastructure. This pipeline was initially developed through a Pawsey Preparatory Access Scheme, and ABLeS access is essential to extend it to the full dataset of thousands of samples.
These details have been provided by project members at project initiation. For more information on the project, please consult the contact(s) or project links above.